Re-thinking History

‘Far and away the best introduction to the state of the questioncurrently available.’

Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz

‘It is a model of concise argument and poses fundamental questionsconcerning the nature of historiography in a post modernist world.’

Alan White, University of East London

‘An excellent introduction to historical method.’Kevin Harrison, Mancat School

‘A valuable, concise introduction to the influence of post-modernismon history.’

M. Thomson, Sheffield University

‘A challenging book which makes accessible recent developments inthe philosophy of history.’

David Dean, Goldsmith College, University of London

‘An excellent introductory text to the field, . . . a very manageable andaccessible work written in an attractively informal style.’

C. M. Williams, University of Wales

‘Keith Jenkins’ Rethinking History is a startlingly clear and thought-provoking introduction to current central debates in history and his-toriography. It is accessible to history students, students in subjectsthat draw on historical past and to the general reader. Already, aclassic text book.’

Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Keith

JenkinsRe-thinking History

With a new preface and conversation withthe author by Alun Munslow

London and New York

First published 1991by Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2003by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 1991 Keith Jenkins

Preface to Routledge Classics edition and ‘In Conversation:Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow’ © 2003 Alun Munslow

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0–415–30443–1 (pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-42686-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-43977-5 (Adobe eReader Format)(Print Edition)

For Sue Morgan with much love

CONTENTS

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition byAlun Munslow xiIn Conversation: Keith Jenkins and AlunMunslow xv

Introduction 1What history is 61On some questions and some answers 332Doing history in the post-modern world 703

Notes 85Index 93

Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly,constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every dis-cipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought andimagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos thanprofessional historiography – so much so that the so-called‘historical method’ consists of little more than the injunction to‘get the story straight’ (without any notion of what the relationof ‘story’ to ‘fact’ might be) and to avoid both conceptualoverdetermination and imaginative excess (i.e., ‘enthusiasm’)at any price.

Yet the price paid is a considerable one. It has resulted in therepression of the conceptual apparatus (without which atomicfacts cannot be aggregated into complex macrostructures andconstituted as objects of discursive representation in a historicalnarrative) and the remission of the poetic moment in historicalwriting to the interior of the discourse (where it functions as anunacknowledged – and therefore uncriticizable – content of thehistorical narrative).

Those historians who draw a firm line between history andphilosophy of history fail to recognise that every historical dis-course contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, phil-osophy of history. . . . The principal difference between historyand philosophy of history is that the latter brings the con-ceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the dis-course to the surface of the text, while history proper (as it iscalled) buries it in the interior of the narrative, where it servesas a hidden or implicit shaping device. . . .

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, pp. 126–7

PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION

Everything, everybody and every book have a history. What KeithJenkins’ book Re-Thinking History, published in 1991, made us allaware of is that such histories are, indeed, just that. They areonly histories. This means we would do well to recognise andremember that the histories we assign to things and people arecomposed, created, constituted, constructed and always situatedliteratures. And, what is more, they carry within them theirauthor’s philosophy or ‘take’ on the world present, past andfuture. Such is the importance and influence of this book,especially among the younger generation of history students,that it now seems quaintly old fashioned to bother to point outthat ‘history’ is not the same as ‘the past’. By the same token thatas a form of knowledge history is – plainly and palpably – anarrative representation.

That history is not some kind of mirror of past reality (andnot because it is distorted by the bees in the bonnet of thehistorian, or their poor inference, or the poverty of theirsources) seems a pretty obvious thing to say these days. This, the

essential ‘historicist’ message of Re-Thinking History has, ofcourse, itself a history. Keith Jenkins admits his indebtednessat the outset with the lengthy quotation from the Americanphilosopher of history Hayden White. What White is pointingto is what Keith Jenkins views as the doubtful belief – stillshared by a great many historians – that we can know thetruth of the past through a detailed knowledge of whathappened: the facts of the matter. In other words, through the‘empirical method’ we ‘discover’ our ‘subject knowledge’,which constitutes the only way we can possess ‘objectiveknowledge’ in our history. And, hence, this is how we get thestory straight.

The point at issue is the one about knowledge – what and howit is possible ‘to know’ the past? Taking his cue from White butalso the other great contemporary philosopher of history FrankAnkersmit, Jenkins pointed out that history is first and foremosta literary narrative about the past, a literary composition of thedata into a narrative where the historian creates a meaning for thepast. The implication is that in producing our historical narra-tives we must no longer suppress history’s character as literature.But there is a hugely important consequence of this. As Jenkinsargues, we must acknowledge the epistemological and philo-sophical assumptions historians make about the ‘proper’ way to‘do history’.

As you will have gathered by now, the first, most widespreadand most misleading philosophical assumption that Jenkinsnails is that history can correspond with the reality of thepast through a knowledge of its content. Jenkins refuses to letthose historians off the hook who endorse this fundamentalmisconception. He brings this crucial issue out into the open,taking it from the obscurity of philosophy of history seminars,forcing us to confront it. And in so doing he compels we his-torians to recognise our basic assumptions about how we con-ventionally think of history as an empirical method rather than

preface to the routledge classics editionxii

epistemologically as a form of literature that carries within itour philosophies of life.

Invoking the French theorist of discourse Michel Foucault andthe American pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty, Jenkins sus-tains his onslaught on the naïve idea that the past world and thepresent word can match each other to do the work of truth.Jenkins pushes home what we need to be reminded about his-tory. That it is not the same as the past. That history is always forsomeone. That history always has a purpose. That history isalways about power. That history is never innocent but alwaysideological (and not in the sense of political bias, but moraljudgements about right and wrong and how the individual his-torian thinks the world works). He insists we think and re-thinkthat which we call a historical fact so that we understand it isonly a description of things that happened and which, therefore,cannot have an intrinsic meaning (facts never speak for them-selves). Moreover, we cannot empathise with people in the pastbecause not only is it plainly impossible to ‘get inside someoneelse’s head’ but to translate another’s intentions from theiractions is an epistemological step too far. And finally, that thelogic of history is not one of discovery but of construction –building on referentiality but deploying figurative thinking,argument, theory, concept and ethics. The past for Jenkins is abuilding site, not a foreign land to be explored.

For Jenkins, what all this means is that no amount of archivalimmersion, or scientific-like methods, or the wish to be rationaland objective, or to be rigorous in our inferences, or distanceourselves from the past, or empathise with it, can change theessential nature of historical study. While all these things do notnecessarily do damage to the past, as a written representation ofsomething that cannot be recovered, history cannot be rescuedas a form of knowledge by laying it ‘firmly’on its empirical oranalytical foundations. What this means is that there is no‘hidden’ or ‘true’ story to be ‘found’. There is no centre to

preface to the routledge classics edition xiii

history because there is no knowable past in terms of what ‘it’means. There is only what we might call the-past-as-history.This is what the French critic Roland Barthes called the ‘realityeffect’. We can only represent the past through the form we giveto its reality.

Jenkins closes the book by posing the question of how can wecope with the past under these circumstances? His answer(which he has developed far more radically of late) is that werecognise what history clearly is: a knowledge production pro-cess that cannot work as a reconstructionist exercise. If we acceptthat we all have epistemological choices open to us, that wemake ontological pre-judgements, and that we have method-ological preferences, then there is no privileged or ‘right’ routeto the past.

Because of this argument – that all history is unavoidablysituated – the fact that Re-Thinking History is now officially a classictext does not mean most historians endorse it. I would say theydon’t. Some still regard it as a dangerous book. Often you willhear something to the effect that it has provided the professionwith a useful reminder that we should pay more attention to therole of language in doing history and that historians usually dohave bees in their bonnet so readers must be aware. But suchcomments only serve to illustrate that the message is still sinkingin. Ahead of its time in 1991, Keith Jenkins’ polemic has earnedits classic status for the way in which, more than any other late-twentieth-century work, it tried to wake up the historical pro-fession from its empirical sleepwalking. And while still too manyin the history profession continue to slumber, the need for thisradical text continues.

A MJ 2002

preface to the routledge classics editionxiv

IN CONVERSATION

Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow

Alun: Can I begin by asking you a rather obvious question;namely, what made you write Re-Thinking History in the first place?

Keith: There are a lot of reasons, but I suppose the main, under-lying one, was my long-time interest in theory – at least a littlebit unusual for a historian. In the 1970s I had read Medieval andModern History at the University of Nottingham – a very trad-itional degree – but then I ‘transferred’ to the Politics Depart-ment where I wrote a Ph.D. in political theory (a thesis onNietzsche, Freud and Sorel). It was then my intention to lecturein political theory, but jobs were scarce and in 1978 I joined theHistory Department at what is now University College Chiches-ter. At first I taught a range of history courses but, in the early1980s, I began to work on the History PGCE, an experiencewhich brought me into contact with postgraduate studentsdrawn, over the years, from practically every university in Britainand which – for these were trainee secondary history teachers –concentrated my mind on the way they thought about the

‘subject’ they were themselves going to teach. And these were‘theoretical’ issues. For example, what is history? Why should itbe taught? What is the epistemological status of historical know-ledge? And so on. And what struck me here was – with notableexceptions – not only the students’ lack of interest in such theor-etical questions but often their intense hostility towards them.Most had clearly managed to obtain good degrees (and oftenhigher degrees) in a ‘discipline’ whose epistemological, meth-odological and ethical constituents remained not only a mysterybut one they had little inclination to probe: why keep thinkingabout history – why not just do it! And it seemed to me that thisunreflexive attitude – to my mind a tremendous indictment of‘our’ history degrees – was unacceptable. Consequently, thecourses I taught right across the board increasingly drew onhistorical theorising in ways influenced by my own reading as Ibegan to ‘move over’ from political to ‘history theory’. And heremy earlier interest in Nietzsche in particular – a ‘post-modernist’well before the term had been invented – combined with mydiscovery, in the early 1980s, of the work of Hayden White,made me receptive to ‘postist’ theorising then circulating inliterary and cultural theory and, more generally, in philosophy.Accordingly, it was this experience which provided the moreimmediate basis for a series of articles published throughout the1980s and which I drew on for Re-Thinking History in 1990–1.Designed to be a short, cheap and cheerful polemic, it was delib-erately opposed to the kinds of thinking about history whichundergraduates were overwhelmingly exposed to – if at all – ontheir courses, thinking dominated by people like E.H. Carr andGeoffrey Elton (whose ‘controversy’ was, in the 1960s when ittook place, already passé relative to the developing work of, say,Barthes and Foucault and White, let alone Derrida), and byintroductory overviews on ‘the nature of history’ by people likeArthur Marwick and John Tosh. Re-Thinking History, then, gave methe chance to develop the idea I then had of the ‘best’ way to

in conversationxvi

theorise history – as a narrative prose discourse the content ofwhich is as much imagined as found and the form of which isexpungeably problematic après Hayden White – in ways whichhadn’t been much done before for history undergraduates asopposed to ‘philosophy of history’ specialists, and it was thispopularising intention which, I suppose, may have accountedfor its relative success at the time and since.

Alun: Were you surprised at its huge success both in terms ofsales and in helping to get ‘postmodern’ ideas into what was –and still is – arguably a very conservative ‘discipline’?

Keith: Yes and no. I mean, in many ways the kinds of things Idiscussed in Re-Thinking History only appeared ‘radical’ within his-tory. The ideas I discussed had long been circulating in practic-ally all the other discourses around: art, architecture, literature,sociology, philosophy. Indeed, these were the areas I drew upon,and so the popularity (and also the vehement attacks on thebook, by Marwick for example) were a little surprising. But, onthe other hand, I knew how intellectually backward the generalcondition of ‘the discipline of history’ was, and how rabidlyanti-theoretical the academic pursuit of history was, and so Ithought there was a niche market just waiting to be opened up. . . and which needed to be opened up. In my view history, likeany other discourse in any culture, is not of ‘a natural kind’, andis thus a theoretical, speculative experiment ‘all the way down’.And students ought – simply by virtue of being engaged in theprocesses of history production – to know something about theproduct they are making and its wider conditions wherein, as anidea, it seems ‘to make sense’. And they still do.

Alun: This leads me to ask you about the current state of

in conversation xvii

‘history and theory’. Has it developed in the last ten years inappreciable ways and, if so, would you re-write Re-ThinkingHistory very differently if you were to write it today?

Keith: Well, things have certainly developed. I suppose I was afairly lonely voice – certainly a fairly lonely popularising voice –in the early 1990s. But today the number of really sophisticatedtexts on historical theory, historiography, historical methodsand epistemology, has multiplied enormously; there are somebrilliant texts around. And I think that it is the impact of the‘posts’ – post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-feminism,post-colonialism . . . and especially the influence of variousdeconstructionist approaches – which has been responsible fortrying to pull historical study – certainly of the academic, pro-fessional type (genre) taught in universities – into the late twen-tieth century. Whether they can get it into the twenty-firstremains to be seen . . .

As to re-writing Re-Thinking History differently today, that isobviously the case: history does not and should not repeat itself!On the other hand, I think the issues it tried to raise have by nomeans gone away, and that is why I haven’t changed anythingfor this Routledge Classics edition. Rather, what I have done, asyou know, is to write a new book (which will be out a little timebefore this edition – in the Autumn of 2002) called Re-FiguringHistory: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline – which tries to bring thingstogether in ways which, for what it’s worth, I see some thingsnow. But I regard this text as, in a way, complementing ratherthan superseding Re-Thinking History: they’re both part of the sameproject of trying to encourage theoretical reflections at a fairlyintroductory and hopefully accessible level for students about toembark on serious historical work.

Alun: My last question and it’s to do with what I’d like to call

in conversationxviii

your style. I know that, personally, you are an enormously laidback and cheerful person, that you have a certain ‘lightness’ (andthe expected ironic take on things) coupled with an adventurousopenness towards newness . . . and yet you write in ways whichappear to be incredibly serious, even zealous. And, in someways, as your own reflections on history have developed sinceRe-Thinking History you have become more extreme, writing moreand more not only on the problematical nature of history per sebut on its possible end . . . on ‘the end of history’. So is there, if Ican put it this way, not so much an irony but a paradox or even acontradiction here?

Keith: I don’t think there is a contradiction. I mean to say, yes,as a person I think I am (certainly speaking intellectually) fairlycheerful and, though it may not appear that way, highly opti-mistic. If you are a mainstream academic historian, or if indeedyou are a radical historian, then my attempt to re-think/re-figure/deconstruct/post-modernise an old discourse mayappear destructive. And in a way it is. But as I’ve put ‘if’ before,there is more to life – more at stake in life – than the hegemoniccontinuation of an ideologically positioned set of guild practicesreified by their beneficiaries into tablets of stone, and it may wellbe that the having of a ‘historical consciousness’ of that or,indeed, any other type is no longer necessary in a social forma-tion that is, arguably, ‘no longer modern’. And so in the nameof, I suppose, future emancipation and empowerment, I amoptimistic about the kinds of histories that are now beingwritten of an experimental kind beyond the limits of the academicgenre – even when most generously construed – if histories per seare still deemed to be required. And I am also optimistic aboutliving in a world ‘without histories’ if what passes for history,however imagined, is a block to the imagining of things that, inthe name of emancipation and empowerment, are altogethermore relevant and to the point.

in conversation xix

As I see it, the historicisation of the past – a particular, pecu-liar, time-space product of a certain kind of essentially WesternEuropean and North American consciousness of the nineteenthcentury – is only one way of ‘past thinking’, only one way ofdomesticating and making familiar the radical otherness of the‘before now’ which, though ideologically understandable, is notimmune from the usual ravages of time. Things come, things go.History as I read it, in both its meta-narrative forms (certainHegelianised Marxisms, say; certain productions of an immanentkind) and in its academic, professional forms, are both interest-ing experiments in the construction of, as I say, something pecu-liar on the face of the earth: historicisations of something thatdoesn’t have histories in it: the past; the ‘before now’. And so, asI say, I’m optimistic about either re-thinking the histories thatwere a crucial part of this ‘experiment of the modern’, or ofthinking thoughts of a prescient kind through another gaze,another discursive practice that will be, hopefully, future orien-tated and liberating: post-modern (and post-modernism dis-courses) of a type, perhaps, as yet little imagined.

J 2002

in conversationxx

INTRODUCTION

This book is addressed primarily to students who are embarkingupon a study of the question, ‘what is history?’ It has beenwritten both as an introduction (in the literal sense that theremay be some points in what follows that have not beenencountered before) and as a polemic. In the following pages Iam running a particular argument as to what I think history is,not that you should accept it but rather that you might engagecritically with it. The aim, throughout, is to help in the devel-opment of your own self-consciously held (reflexive) positionon history . . . to be in control of your own discourse.1

Both these things – an introductory text and a polemic – seemto me to be necessary at this point in time. For although there areintroductory texts on the market already, popular primers suchas Edward Carr’s What is History?, Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice ofHistory and Arthur Marwick’s The Nature of History2 these, despitetheir sometime revision, still carry with them the ballast of theirformative years (the 1950s and 1960s) such that they have noweffectively become old favourites. They are also in a sense (as are

more recent additions to the genre such as John Tosh’s The Pursuitof History3) very ‘English’ texts, a characteristic which has had thesomewhat unfortunate consequence of helping isolate historyfrom some of the wider and arguably more generous intellectualdevelopments that have recently been taking place in relateddiscourses. Both philosophy and literature, for example, haveengaged very seriously with the question of what is the nature oftheir own nature.4

It might therefore well be argued that history is, vis-à-vis theseneighbouring discourses, theoretically backward, a remark thatperhaps calls for an immediate illustration in order to preventany misunderstandings.

If you go into an academic bookshop and look over theshelves occupied by texts on philosophy, you will find a vastarray of works wherein the problem of the foundations andlimits of what can be known and what can be done ‘philo-sophically’ are the staple diet: texts on ontology (theories ofbeing), epistemology (theories of knowledge) and method-ology; texts on scepticism, on language and meaning, on typesof analysis – idealist, materialist, realist, phenomenological –and so on. If you then wander over to the shelves on literature,you will find a separate section on literary theory (in addition toa section on literary criticism). Here are texts on Marxist andfeminist readings, on Freudian and post-Freudian analyses; ondeconstructionism, critical theory, reception theory and inter-textuality; on poetics, narratology, rhetoric, allegory and soforth. But then continue over to the history area. Here it is almostcertain that there will be no section on history theory (even thephrase looks odd and clumsy – befitting unfamiliarity) but only,tucked away discreetly amongst the serried ranks of historybooks, the aforementioned Elton and others with, if you arelucky, perhaps an odd copy of (a now domesticated) Geyl orBloch or Collingwood or, if you are luckier still, a ‘recent’Hayden White or a Foucault.5 In other words, in moving across a

introduction2

few feet of flooring you are, in the main, moving across a gener-ation gap; from theoretically rich and very recent texts to workson the nature of history produced twenty to thirty years ago or,in the case of Bloch and his contemporaries, in the 1930s and1940s.

Now this is obviously not to say that enormously sophisti-cated and more recent texts on history and ‘history theory’ donot exist (thus, variously, Callinicos or Oakeshott; thus variouspost-modernist works; thus developments in the areas of intel-lectual and cultural history6). Nor is it to say that this lack ofconcern for history theory and its consequences has not beenregularly noticed. Long ago Gareth Stedman-Jones pointed to thepoverty of English empiricism; more recently Raphael Samuelhas commented on the relatively retarded condition of muchhistorical work with its fetishism of the document, its obsessionwith ‘the facts’ and its accompanying methodology of ‘naïverealism’. David Cannadine’s essay, with his strictures against thesterility, downright dullness and myopia of much mainstreamhistory, has been much referred to by professional historians,whilst Christopher Parker’s study of the major characteristics ofthe ‘English tradition’ of historical writing as exemplified byits leading exponents since c. 1850, is an investigation ofthat deep rut within which a certain type of individualism hasrun, a methodological perspective largely unreflexive aboutits own ideological presuppositions.7 Yet such developmentsand analyses as these have not significantly fed through so as toinform the more popular surveys and guides to the nature ofhistory. Theoretical discussions are still on the whole skirted byrobustly practical practising historians, and certainly the occa-sional text on theory does not exert the same kind of heavypressure that the many texts on, say, literary theory, exert on thestudy of literature.

But arguably this is the way that history ought to go if it is tobe ‘modernised’. Accordingly I have drawn here on such related

introduction 3

areas as philosophy and literary theory. For if ‘doing history’ isabout how you can read and make sense of the past and thepresent, then it seems important to me to use discourses thathave ‘readings’ and the construction of meanings as majorconcerns.8

How, then, is the text structured? It has three quite delib-erately short chapters.9 In the first I address directly the questionof what history is and how the history question can be answeredin ways which do not necessarily replicate more ‘English’ for-mulations, that do not leave such dominant (common-sense)discourses as unproblematic and which begin to open up historyto somewhat wider perspectives. (Bear in mind that ‘history’ isreally ‘histories’, for at this point we ought to stop thinking ofhistory as though it were a simple and rather obvious thing andrecognise that there is a multiplicity of types of history whoseonly common feature is that their ostensible object of enquiry is‘the past’.)

In chapter 2 I apply that ‘answer’ to some of the issues andproblems commonly surfacing in some of the more basic andintroductory debates about the nature of history. Here I shallargue that, although regularly posed, such issues and problemsare more rarely resolved or put into context, leaving them tantal-isingly open ended and/or mystifying. These are problems suchas: is it possible to say what really happened in the past, to get tothe truth, to reach objective understandings or, if not, is historyincorrigibly interpretive? What are historical facts (and indeedare there any such things)? What is bias and what does it meanto say that historians ought to detect it and root it out? Is itpossible to empathise with people who lived in the past? Is ascientific history possible or is history essentially an art? What isthe status of those couplets that so often appear in definitionsof what history is all about: cause and effect, similarity anddifference, continuity and change?

In chapter 3 I pull together all the points I will by then have

introduction4

made by relating them to the position from which I am work-ing; by inserting them into the context that I think informs thistext. I have said already that the point of the text is to offer someassistance towards the working out of some of the argumentsthat gravitate around the question of what is history and so, tofurther this aim, I thought it appropriate to say why I considerwhat history is in the way that I do and not in other ways, toposition myself in the discourse I have been commenting uponand consider its possibilities. I hasten to add that I do this notbecause my ideas are necessarily of much significance butbecause, not existing in a vacuum, it may well be that the timesthat have produced me, that have so to speak ‘written me’, willalready have and will continue to write you too. I refer to thesetimes as post-modern and thus end with a short contextualisingchapter entitled ‘Doing history in the post-modern world’ –arguably the world we live in.

introduction 5

1WHAT HISTORY IS

In this chapter I want to try and answer the question ‘what ishistory?’ To do this I will look initially at what history is intheory; secondly examine what it is in practice; and finally puttheory and practice together into a definition – a methodologic-ally informed sceptical/ironic definition – that I hope is com-prehensive enough to give you a reasonable grip not only on the‘history question’ but also on some of the debates and positionsthat surround it.

ON THEORY

At the level of theory I would like to make two points. The first(which I will outline in this paragraph and then develop) is thathistory is one of a series of discourses about the world. Thesediscourses do not create the world (that physical stuff on whichwe apparently live) but they do appropriate it and give it all themeanings it has. That bit of the world which is history’s (osten-sible) object of enquiry is the past. History as discourse is thus in

a different category to that which it discourses about, that is, thepast and history are different things. Additionally, the past andhistory are not stitched into each other such that only one histor-ical reading of the past is absolutely necessary. The past andhistory float free of each other, they are ages and miles apart. Forthe same object of enquiry can be read differently by differentdiscursive practices (a landscape can be read/interpreteddifferently by geographers, sociologists, historians, artists,economists, etc.) whilst, internal to each, there are differentinterpretive readings over time and space; as far as history isconcerned historiography shows this.

The above paragraph is not an easy one. I have made a lot ofstatements, but all of them revolve, actually, around the distinc-tion between the past and history. This distinction is thereforecrucial for you to understand, for if it is appreciated then it andthe debates it gives rise to will help to clarify what history is intheory. Accordingly I will examine the points I have just made,by looking in some detail at the past-history difference and thenby considering some of the main consequences arising from it.

Let me begin with the idea that history is a discourse about,but categorically different from, the past. This might strike youas odd for you may have missed this distinction before or, if not,you may still not have bothered too much about it. One of thereasons why this is so, why the distinction is generally leftunworked, is because as English-speakers we tend to lose sight ofthe fact that there actually is this distinction between history – asthat which has been written/recorded about the past – and thepast itself, because the word history covers both things.1 It wouldbe preferable, therefore, always to register this difference byusing the term ‘the past’ for all that has gone on before every-where, whilst using the word ‘historiography’ for history, his-toriography referring here to the writings of historians. Thiswould be good practice (the past as the object of the historians’attention, historiography as the way historians attend to it)

what history is 7

leaving the word ‘History’ (with a capital H) to refer to thewhole ensemble of relations. However, habit might be hard tobreak, and I might myself use the word ‘history’ to refer to thepast, to historiography and to the totality of relationships. Butremember if and when I do, I keep the said distinction in mind –and you should too.

It may well be, however, that this clarification on thepast-history distinction seems inconsequential; that one is leftthinking, so what? What does it matter? Let me offer threeillustrations of why the past-history distinction is important tounderstand.

1 The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be broughtback again by historians in very different media, forexample in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not asactual events. The past has gone and history is what histor-ians make of it when they go to work. History is the labourof historians (and/or those acting as if they were histor-ians) and when they meet, one of the first questions theyask each other is what they are working on. It is this work,embodied in books, periodicals, etc., that you read whenyou do history (‘I am going to university to read history’).What this means is that history is quite literally on libraryand other shelves. Thus if you start a course onseventeenth-century Spain, you do not actually go to theseventeenth century or to Spain; you go, with the help ofyour reading list, to the library. This is where seventeenth-century Spain is – between Dewey numbers – for whereelse do teachers send you in order to ‘read it up’? Ofcourse you could go to other places where you can findother traces of the past – for example Spanish archives –but wherever you go, when you get there you will have ‘toread’. This reading is not spontaneous or natural butlearned – on various courses for example – and informed

what history is8

(made meaning-full) by other texts. History (histori-ography) is an inter-textual, linguistic construct.

2 Let us say that you have been studying part of England’spast – the sixteenth century – at A level. Let us imagine thatyou have used one major text-book: Elton’s England under theTudors. In class you have discussed aspects of the sixteenthcentury, you have class notes, but for your essays and thebulk of your revision you have used Elton. When the examcame along you wrote in the shadow of Elton. And whenyou passed, you gained an A level in English history, aqualification for considering aspects of ‘the past’. Butreally it would be more accurate to say you have an A levelin Geoffrey Elton: for what, actually, at this stage, is your‘reading’ of the English past if not basically his reading ofit?

3 These two brief examples of the past-history distinctionmay seem innocuous, but actually it can have enormouseffects. For example, although millions of women havelived in the past (in Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages,Africa, America . . .) few of them appear in history, thatis, in history texts. Women, to use a phrase, have been‘hidden from history’, that is, systematically excludedfrom most historians’ accounts. Accordingly, feminists arenow engaged in the task of ‘writing women back intohistory’, whilst both men and women are looking at theinterconnected constructions of masculinity.2 And at thispoint you might pause to consider how many othergroups, people(s), classes, have been/are omitted fromhistories and why; and what might be the consequences ifsuch omitted ‘groups’ were central to historical accountsand the now central groups were marginalised.

More will be said about the significance and possibilities ofworking the past-history distinction later, but I would now like

what history is 9

to look at another argument from the earlier paragraph (p. 5)where I said that we have to understand that the past and historyare not stitched into each other such that one and only onereading of any phenomenon is entailed, that the same object ofenquiry is capable of being read differently by different dis-courses whilst, internal to each, there are different readings overspace and time.

To begin to illustrate this, let us imagine that through awindow we can see a landscape (though not all of it because thewindow-frame quite literally ‘frames’ it). We can see in theforeground several roads; beyond we can see other roads withhouses alongside; we can see rolling fields with farmhouses inthem; on the skyline, some miles away, we can see ridges of hills.In the middle distance we can see a market-town. The sky is awatery blue.

Now there is nothing in this landscape that says ‘geography’.Yet clearly a geographer could account for it geographically.Thus s/he might read the land as displaying specific fieldpatterns and farming practices; the roads could become part ofa series of local/regional communication networks, the farmsand town could be read in terms of a specific population distri-bution; contour maps could chart the terrain, climatic geog-raphers could explain the climate/weather and, say, consequenttypes of irrigation. In this way the view could become some-thing else – geography. Similarly, a sociologist could take thesame landscape and construct it sociologically: people in thetown could become data for occupational structures, size offamily units, etc.; population distribution could be consideredin terms of class, income, age, sex; climate could be seen asaffecting leisure facilities, and so on.

Historians too can turn the same landscape into theirdiscourse. Field patterns today could be compared to thosepre-enclosure; population now to that of 1831, 1871; landownership and political power analysed over time; one could

what history is10

examine how a bit of the view edges into a national park, ofwhen and why the railway and canal ceased functioning andso on.

Now, given that there is nothing intrinsic in the view thatshouts geography, sociology, history, etc., then we can seeclearly that whilst historians and the rest of them do not inventthe view (all that stuff seems to be there all right) they do inventall its descriptive categories and any meanings it can be said tohave. They construct the analytical and methodological tools tomake out of this raw material their ways of reading and talkingabout it: discoursing. In that sense we read the world as a text,and, logically, such readings are infinite. By which I do not meanthat we just make up stories about the world/the past (that is,that we know the world/the past and then make up stories aboutthem) but rather the claim is a much stronger one; that theworld/the past comes to us always already as stories and that wecannot get out of these stories (narratives) to check if theycorrespond to the real world/past, because these ‘always already’narratives constitute ‘reality’. Which means, in the examplebeing discussed, that the landscape (which only becomes mean-ingful as a reading) cannot fix such readings once and for all;thus geographers may interpret and re-interpret (read and re-read) the landscape endlessly whilst arguing about just what isbeing said here ‘geographically’. Additionally, given that geog-raphy as a discourse has not always existed, then not only havegeographers’ readings had to begin and not only have theydiffered over space and time, but geographers have themselvesunderstood/read what constitutes the discourse they are work-ing within differently too; that is, geography itself as a way ofreading the world needs interpreting/historicising. And so it iswith sociology and history. Different sociologists and historiansinterpret the same phenomenon differently through discoursesthat are always on the move, that are always being de-composedand re-composed; are always positioned and positioning, and

what history is 11

which thus need constant self-examination as discourses bythose who use them.

At this point, then, let me assume that the argument thathistory as a discourse is categorically different to the past hasbeen indicated. I said at the start of the chapter, however, that atthe level of theory vis-à-vis what is history, I would be makingtwo points. Here is the second.

Given the past-history distinction, the problem for the histor-ian who somehow wants to capture the past within his/herhistory thus becomes: how do you fit these two things together?Obviously how this connection is attempted, how the historiantries to know the past, is crucial in determining the possibilitiesof what history is and can be, not least because it is history’sclaim to knowledge (rather than belief or assertion) that makesit the discourse it is (I mean, historians do not usually see them-selves as writers of fiction, although inadvertently they may be).3

Yet because of the past-history difference, and because the objectof enquiry that historians work on is, in most of its manifest-ations, actually absent in that only traces of the past remain, thenclearly there are all kinds of limits controlling the knowledgeclaims that historians can make. And for me, in this fittingtogether of past-history, there are three very problematic theor-etical areas: areas of epistemology, methodology and ideology,each of which must be discussed if we are to see what history is.

Epistemology (from the Greek episteme = knowledge) refers tothe philosophical area of theories of knowledge. This area isconcerned with how we know about anything. In that sensehistory is part of another discourse, philosophy, taking part inthe general question of what it is possible to know with refer-ence to its own area of knowledge – the past. And here youmight see the problem already, for if it is hard to know aboutsomething that exists, to say something about an effectivelyabsent subject like ‘the past in history’ is especially difficult. Itseems obvious that all such knowledge is therefore likely to be

what history is12

tentative, and constructed by historians working under all kindsof presuppositions and pressures which did not, of course, oper-ate on people in the past. Yet, we still see historians trying toraise before us the spectre of the real past, an objective past aboutwhich their accounts are accurate and even true. Now I thinksuch certaintist claims are not – and never were – possible toachieve, and I would say that in our current situation this oughtto be obvious – as I will argue in chapter 3. Yet to accept this, toallow doubt to run, clearly affects what you might think historyis, that is, it gives you part of the answer to what history is andcan be. For to admit not really to know, to see history as being(logically) anything you want it to be (the fact-value distinctionallows this; besides there have been so very many histories)poses the question of how specific histories came to be con-structed into one shape rather than another, not only epistemo-logically, but methodologically and ideologically too. Here, whatcan be known and how we can know interact with power. Yet ina sense this is so – and this point must be stressed – only becauseof history’s epistemological fragility. For if it were possible toknow once and for all, now and for ever, then there would be noneed for any more history to be written, for what would be thepoint of countless historians saying it all over again in the sameway? History (historical constructions not ‘the past/future’)would stop, and if you think that the idea of stopping history(historians) is absurd it really isn’t: stopping history is not onlypart of Orwell’s 1984 for example, but a part of Europeanexperience in the 1930s – the more immediate time and placethat made Orwell consider it.

Epistemological fragility, then, allows for historians’ readingsto be multifarious (one past – many histories) so what is it thatmakes history so epistemologically fragile? There are four basicreasons.

First (and in what follows I draw on David Lowenthal’sarguments in his The Past is a Foreign Country4) no historian can

what history is 13

cover and thus re-cover the totality of past events because their‘content’ is virtually limitless. One cannot recount more than afraction of what has occurred and no historian’s account evercorresponds precisely with the past: the sheer bulk of the pastprecludes total history. Most information about the past hasnever been recorded and most of the rest was evanescent.

Second, no account can re-cover the past as it was because thepast was not an account but events, situations, etc. As the past hasgone, no account can ever be checked against it but only againstother accounts. We judge the ‘accuracy’ of historians’ accountsvis-à-vis other historians’ interpretations and there is no realaccount, no proper history that, deep down, allows us to checkall other accounts against it: there is no fundamentally correct‘text’ of which other interpretations are just variations; vari-ations are all there are. Here the cultural critic Steven Giles issuccinct when he comments that what has gone before is alwaysapprehended through the sedimented layers of previous inter-pretations and through the reading habits and categoriesdeveloped by previous/current interpretive discourses.5 And thisinsight allows us to make the point that this way of seeing thingsmakes the study of history (the past) necessarily a study of his-toriography (historians), historiography therefore being con-sidered not as an extra to the study of history but as actuallyconstituting it. This is an area I shall return to in chapter 2; butnow to the third point.

And this is that no matter how verifiable, how widely accept-able or checkable, history remains inevitably a personal construct,a manifestation of the historian’s perspective as a ‘narrator’.Unlike direct memory (itself suspect) history relies on someoneelse’s eyes and voice; we see through an interpreter who standsbetween past events and our readings of them. Of course, asLowenthal says, written history ‘in practice’ cuts down thehistorian’s logical freedom to write anything by allowing thereader access to his/her sources, but the historian’s viewpoint

what history is14

and predilections still shape the choice of historical materials,and our own personal constructs determine what we make ofthem. The past that we ‘know’ is always contingent upon ourown views, our own ‘present’. Just as we are ourselves productsof the past so the known past (history) is an artefact of ours.Nobody, however immersed in the past, can divest himself/herself of his/her own knowledge and assumptions. To explainthe past, Lowenthal notes, ‘historians go beyond the actualrecord to frame hypotheses in present day modes of thought . . .“we are moderns and our words and thought can not but bemodern”, noted Maitland, “it is too late for us to be early Eng-lish”’.6 There are, then, few limits to the shaping power ofinterpretive, imagining words. ‘Look’ says the poet Khlebnikovin his Decrees To The Planets, ‘the sun obeys my syntax’.7 ‘Look’, saysthe historian, ‘the past obeys my interpretation’.

Now this might look slightly poetical itself, so the point beingmade about sources at one and the same time preventing thehistorian’s total freedom and yet not fixing things such that theycan really stop endless interpretations might be illustrated by amundane example. Thus there are many disagreements as toHitler’s intentions after gaining power, and the causes of theSecond World War. One such famous long-running disagree-ment has been between A.J.P. Taylor and H. Trevor-Roper. Thisdisagreement was not based on their merits as historians; bothare very experienced, both have ‘skills’, both can read documentsand in this case they often read the same ones, yet still theydisagreed. Thus whilst the sources may prevent just anything atall from being said, nevertheless the same events/sources do notentail that one and only one reading has to follow.

The above three reasons for epistemological fragility are basedon the idea that history is less than the past; that historians canonly recover fragments. But the fourth point stresses that,through hindsight, we in a way know more about the past thanthe people who lived in it. In translating the past into modern

what history is 15

terms and in using knowledge perhaps previously unavailable,the historian discovers both what has been forgotten about thepast and pieces together things never pieced together before.People and social formations are thus caught up in processes thatcan only be seen in retrospect, and documents and other tracesare ripped out of their original contexts of purpose and functionto illustrate, say, a pattern which might not be remotely mean-ingful to any of their authors. And all this is, as Lowenthal says,inevitable. History always conflates, it changes, it exaggeratesaspects of the past: ‘Time is foreshortened, details selected andhighlighted, action concentrated, relations simplified, not to[deliberately] alter . . . the events but to . . . give them mean-ing’.8 Even the most empirical chronicler has to invent narrativestructures to give shape to time and place: ‘Res gestae may well beone damned thing after another . . . but it cannot possibly appearas such for all meaning would then be extruded from it’.9 Andbecause stories emphasise linkages and play down the role ofbreaks, of ruptures, then, concludes Lowenthal, histories asknown to us appear more comprehensible than we have anyreason to believe the past was.

These then are the main (and well known) epistemologicallimits. I have drawn them quickly and impressionistically andyou might go on to read Lowenthal and the others yourself. But Inow intend to move on. For if these are the epistemologicallimits to what can be known, then they obviously interconnectwith the ways historians try and find out as much as they can.And, with historians’ methods as with epistemology, there areno definitive ways that have to be used by virtue of their beingcorrect; historians’ methods are every bit as fragile as theirepistemologies.

So far I have argued that history is a shifting discourse con-structed by historians and that from the existence of the past noone reading is entailed: change the gaze, shift the perspectiveand new readings appear. Yet although historians know all this,

what history is16

most seem to studiously ignore it and strive for objectivity andtruth nevertheless. And this striving for truth cuts throughideological/methodological positions.

Thus on the empirical right (somewhat), G. Elton in The Practiceof History10 states at the start of his chapter on research: ‘The studyof history, then, amounts to a search for the truth’. And,although the same chapter ends with a series of qualifications –‘He [the historian] knows that what he is studying is real [but]he knows that he can never recover all of it . . . he knows that theprocess of historical research and reconstruction will never end,but he is also conscious that this does not render his work unrealor illegimate’ – it is obvious that such caveats do not seriouslyaffect Elton’s originally stated ‘truth search’.

On the Marxist left (somewhat), E. P. Thompson in The Povertyof Theory11 writes that, ‘For some time . . . the materialist concep-tion of history . . . has been growing in self-confidence. As amature practice . . . it is perhaps the strongest discipline derivingfrom the Marxist tradition. Even in my own life-time . . . theadvances have been considerable, and one had supposed these tobe advances in knowledge.’ Thompson admits that this is not to saythat such knowledge is subject to ‘scientific proof ’, but he holdsit to be real knowledge nevertheless.

In the empirical centre (somewhat), A. Marwick in The Natureof History12 appreciates what he calls the ‘subjective dimension’ ofhistorians’ accounts, but for him this doesn’t live in, say, thehistorian’s ideological position, but in the nature of the evi-dence, historians being ‘forced into a greater display of personalinterpretation by the imperfections of their source materials’.This being the case Marwick thus argues that it is the job of thehistorians to develop ‘tight methodological rules’ whereby theycan reduce their ‘moral’ interventions. Thus Marwick links up toElton: ‘Elton is keen to establish that just because historicalexplanation does not depend upon universal laws, that does notmean it is not governed by very strict rules’. And so, for all these

what history is 17

historians, truth, knowledge and legitimacy derive from tightmethodological rules and procedures. It is this that cuts downinterpretive flux.

My argument is different. For me what determines interpret-ation ultimately lies beyond method and evidence in ideology.For while most historians would agree that a rigorous method isimportant, there is a problem as to which rigorous method theyare talking about. In Marwick’s own section on method hereviews a selection from which one can (presumably) choose.Thus, would you like to follow Hegel or Marx or Dilthey orWeber or Popper or Hempel or Aron or Collingwood or Drayor Oakeshott or Danto or Gallie or Walsh or Atkinson or Leff orHexter? Would you care to go along with modern empiricists,feminists, the Annales School, neo-Marxists, new-stylists, eco-nometricians, structuralists or post-structuralists, or even Mar-wick himself, to name but twenty-five possibilities? And this is ashort list! The point is that even if you could make a choice, whatwould be the criteria? How could one know which methodwould lead to the ‘truer’ past? Of course each method would berigorous, that is, internally coherent and consistent, but it wouldalso be self-referencing. That is, it might tell you how to conductvalid arguments within itself but, given that all the choices dothis, then the problem of discriminating somehow betweentwenty-five alternatives just will not go away. Thompson is rig-orous and so is Elton; on what grounds does one choose? OnMarwick’s? But why his? So, is it not likely that in the end onechooses say, Thompson, because one just likes what Thompsondoes with his method; one likes his reasons for doing history:for all other things being equal, why else might one take up aposition?

To summarise. Talk of method as the road to truth is mislead-ing. There is a range of methods without any agreed criteria forchoosing. Often people like Marwick argue that despite all themethodological differences between, say, empiricists and

what history is18

structuralists, they do nevertheless agree on the fundamentals.But this again is not so. The fact that structuralists go toenormous lengths to explain very precisely that they are notempiricists; the fact that they invented their specific approachesprecisely to differentiate themselves from everyone else seems tohave been a point somewhat ignored by Marwick and the others.

I want now to deal briefly with just one further argumentregarding method which regularly occurs in introductorydebates about the ‘nature of history’. It is about concepts and itruns as follows: it may well be that the differences betweenmethods cannot be closed down, but are there not key conceptsthat all historians use? Doesn’t this imply some commonmethodological ground?

Now it is certainly the case that, in all types of histories, oneconstantly meets so called ‘historical concepts’ (by not callingthem ‘historians’ concepts’ such concepts look impersonal andobjective, as though they belong to a history that is somehowself-generating). Not only that, such concepts are referred toquite regularly as the ‘heartlands’ of history. These are conceptssuch as time, evidence, empathy, cause and effect, continuity andchange, and so on.

I am not going to argue that you should not ‘work’ concepts,but I am concerned that when presenting these particular ones,the impression is strongly given that they are indeed obviousand timeless and that they do constitute the universal buildingblocks of historical knowledge. Yet this is ironic, for one of thethings that the opening up of history ought to have done is tohistoricise history itself; to see all historical accounts asimprisoned in time and space and thus to see their concepts notas universal heartlands but as specific, local expressions. Thishistoricisation is easy to demonstrate in the case of ‘common’concepts.

In an article on new developments in history, the educational-ist Donald Steel has considered how certain concepts became

what history is 19

‘heartland concepts’, showing how in the 1960s five major con-cepts were identified as constituting history: time, space,sequence, moral judgement and social realism.13 Steel points outthat these were refined (not least by himself) by 1970 to providethe ‘key concepts’ of history: time, evidence, cause and effect,continuity and change, and similarity and difference. Steelexplains that it was these that became the basis for School’sCouncil History, the GCSE, certain A level developments, andwhich have been influential both in undergraduate courses andmore generally. Apparently then these ‘old’ heartlands have beenpumping away for less than twenty years, are not universal, anddo not come out of historians’ methods as such but very muchout of general educational thinking. Obviously they are ideo-logical too, for what might happen if other concepts were usedto organise the (dominant) field: structure-agency, over-determination, conjuncture, uneven development, centre-periphery, dominant-marginal, base-superstructure, rupture,genealogy, mentalité, hegemony, élite, paradigm, etc.? It is time toaddress ideology directly.

Let me begin with an example. It would be possible at thispoint in space and time to place in any school or undergraduatehistory syllabus a course that would be quite properly historical(in that it looked like other histories) but in which the choice ofsubject matter and the methodological approach was made froma black, Marxist, feminist perspective. Yet I doubt if any suchcourse could be found. Why not? Not because it would not behistory, for it would, but because black Marxist-feminists don’treally have the power to put such a course into this sort of publiccirculation. Yet if one were to ask those who might well have thepower to decide what does constitute ‘suitable courses’, whomight well have the power to effect such inclusions/exclusions,then it is likely that they would argue that the reason for such anon-appearance is because such a course would be ideological –that is, that the motives for such a history would come from

what history is20

concerns external to history per se; that it would be a vehicle forthe delivery of a specific position for persuasive purposes. Nowthis distinction between ‘history as such’ and ‘ideological his-tory’ is interesting because it implies, and is meant to imply, thatcertain histories (generally the dominant ones) are not ideo-logical at all, do not position people, and do not deliver views ofthe past that come from outside ‘the subject’. But we havealready seen that meanings given to histories of all descriptionsare necessarily that; not meanings intrinsic in the past (any morethan the ‘landscape’ had our meanings already in it beforewe put them there) but meanings given to the past fromoutside(rs). History is never for itself; it is always for someone.

Accordingly it seems plausible to say that particular socialformations want their historians to deliver particular things. Italso seems plausible to say that the predominantly deliveredpositions will be in the interests of those stronger ruling blocswithin social formations, not that such positions are automatic-ally achieved, unchallenged or secured once and for all and ‘thatis it’. The fact that history per se is an ideological construct meansthat it is constantly being re-worked and re-ordered by all thosewho are variously affected by power relationships; because thedominated as well as the dominant also have their versions of thepast to legitimate their practices, versions which have to beexcluded as improper from any place on the agenda of the dom-inant discourse. In that sense re-orderings of the messages to bedelivered (often many such re-orderings are referred to academ-ically as ‘controversies’) just have to be constructed continuouslybecause the needs of the dominant/subordinate are constantlybeing re-worked in the real world as they seek to mobilisepeople(s) in support of their interests. History is forged in suchconflict and clearly these conflicting needs for history impingeupon the debates (struggle for ownership) as to what history is.

So, at this point, can we not see that the way to answer thequestion of ‘what is history?’ in ways that are realistic is to

what history is 21

substitute the word ‘who’ for ‘what’, and add ‘for’ to the end ofthe phrase; thus, the question becomes not ‘what is history?’ but‘who is history for?’ If we do this then we can see that history isbound to be problematic because it is a contested term/discourse, meaning different things to different groups. Forsome groups want a sanitised history where conflict and distressare absent; some want history to lead to quietism; some wanthistory to embody rugged individualism, some to provide strat-egies and tactics for revolution, some to provide grounds forcounter-revolution, and so on. It is easy to see how history for arevolutionary is bound to be different from that desired by aconservative. It is also easy to see how the list of uses for historyis not only logically but practically endless; I mean, what woulda history be like that everyone could once and for all agree on?Let me briefly clarify these comments with an illustration.

In his novel 1984, Orwell wrote that those who control thepresent control the past and those who control the past controlthe future. This seems likely outside fiction too. Thus people(s)in the present need antecedents to locate themselves now andlegitimate their ongoing and future ways of living. (Actually ofcourse the ‘facts’ of the past – or anything else – legitimatenothing at all given the fact–value distinction, but the pointbeing addressed here is how people act as if they do.) Thuspeople(s) literally feel the need to root themselves today andtomorrow in their yesterdays. Recently such yesterdays havebeen sought for (and found, given that the past can and willsustain countless narratives) by women, blacks, regional group-ings, various minorities, etc. In these pasts explanations forcurrent existences and future programmes are made. A little fur-ther back and the working classes too sought to root themselvesby way of a historically contrived trajectory. Further back stillthe bourgeoisie found its genealogy and began to construct itshistory for itself (and others). In that sense all classes/groupswrite their collective autobiographies. History is the way

what history is22

people(s) create, in part, their identities. It is far more than a slotin the school/academic curriculum, though we can see howwhat goes into such spaces is crucially important for all thosevariously interested parties.

Do we not know this all the time? Is it not obvious that suchan important ‘legitimating’ phenomenon as history is rooted inreal needs and power? I think it is, except that when the domin-ant discourse refers to the constant re-writing of histories it doesso in ways that displace such needs: it muses blandly that eachgeneration re-writes its own history. But the question is howand why? And the arguable answer, alluded to in Orwell, isbecause power relations produce ideological discourses such as‘history as knowledge’ which are necessary for all involved interms of conflicting legitimation exercises.

Let us conclude the discussion of what history is in theory. Ihave argued that history is composed of epistemology, method-ology and ideology. Epistemology shows we can never reallyknow the past; that the gap between the past and history (his-toriography) is an ontological one, that is, is in the very natureof things such that no amount of epistemological effort canbridge it. Historians have devised ways of working to cut downthe influence of the interpreting historian by developing rigor-ous methods which they have then tried variously to universal-ise, so that if everyone practised them then a heartland of skills,concepts, routines and procedures could reach towards objectiv-ity. But there are many methodologies; the so-called heartlandconcepts are of recent and partial construction, and I haveargued that the differences that we see are there because historyis basically a contested discourse, an embattled terrain whereinpeople(s), classes and groups autobiographically constructinterpretations of the past literally to please themselves. There isno definitive history outside these pressures, any (temporary)consensus only being reached when dominant voices can silenceothers either by overt power or covert incorporation. In the end

what history is 23

history is theory and theory is ideological and ideology just ismaterial interests. Ideology seeps into every nook and cranny ofhistory, including the everyday practices of making histories inthose institutions predominantly set aside in our social forma-tion for that purpose – especially universities. Let us now look athistory as that sort of practice.

ON PRACTICE

I have just concluded that history has been and will be made formany different reasons and in many places, and that one suchtype is professional history, that is, the history produced by(generally) salaried historians working (on the whole) in highereducation and especially universities. In The Death of the Past14 thehistorian J. H. Plumb described such (Elton-like) professionalhistory as the process of trying to establish the truth of whathappened in the past and which could then be pitched overagainst popular memory/common-sense/recipe-knowledge‘pasts’ in order to get such half-formed, half-digested (and forPlumb) half-baked constructions out of the way. In On Living in anOld Country,15 Patrick Wright has argued that not only is Plumb’stask impossible because, as we have seen, there are nounproblematic historical (historians’) truths as such; and thatnot only is Plumb’s aim possibly undesirable because in, say,popular memory, there may well lie strengths and alternativereadings which it might be necessary to oppose at times to‘official’ histories (Wright suggests we think here of the proles’memories in Orwell’s 1984) but also because one type of institu-tion where such eradication might be carried out, the edu-cational institution, is itself intimately involved in popularmemory-type socialisation processes. For although professionalhistorians overwhelmingly present themselves as academicand disinterested, and although they are certainly in some ways‘distanced’, nevertheless, it is more illuminating to see such

what history is24

practitioners as being not so much outside the ideological fraybut as occupying very dominant positions within it; to see pro-fessional histories as expressions of how dominant ideologiescurrently articulate history ‘academically’. It seems ratherobvious that, seen in a wider cultural and ‘historical’ perspec-tive, multi-million pound institutional investments such as ournational universities are integral to the reproduction of the on-going social formation and are thus at the forefront of culturalguardianship (academic standards) and ideological control; itwould be somewhat careless if they were not.

Given that I have tried so far to locate history in the intersticesof real interests and pressures, I need to consider ‘scholarly’pressures too, not only because it is their type of history thatpredominantly defines the field as to what ‘history really is’, butalso because it is the type of history studied on A level andundergraduate courses. On such courses you are, in effect, beinginducted into academic history; you are to become like the pro-fessionals. So what are the professionals like and how do theymake histories?16

Let us start this way. History is produced by a group oflabourers called historians when they go to work; it is theirjob. And when they go to work they take with them certainidentifiable things.

First they take themselves personally: their values, positions,their ideological perspectives.

Second they take their epistemological presuppositions. Theseare not always held very consciously but historians will have ‘inmind’ ways of gaining ‘knowledge’. Here will come into play arange of categories – economic, social, political, cultural, ideo-logical, etc. – a range of concepts across/within these categories(thus within the political category there may be much use of,say, class, power, state, sovereignty, legitimacy, etc.) and broadassumptions about the constancy, or otherwise, of humanbeings (ironically and a-historically referred to very often as

what history is 25

‘human nature’). Through the use of these categories, conceptsand assumptions, the historian will generate hypotheses, formu-late abstractions, and organise and reorganise his/her materialsto include and exclude. Historians also use technical vocabular-ies and these in turn (aside from being inevitably anachronistic)affect not only what they say but the way they say it. Such cat-egories, concepts and vocabularies are constantly beingreworked, but without them historians would not be able tounderstand each others’ accounts or make up their own, nomatter how much they may disagree about things.

Third, historians have routines and procedures (methods, inthe narrow sense of the term) for close working on material:ways of checking it for its origins, position, authenticity, reliabil-ity. . . These routines will apply to all the materials worked onalbeit with various degrees of concentration and rigour (manyslips and mistakes occur). Here are a range of techniquesrunning from the elaborate to the nitty-gritty; these are the sortsof practices often referred to as ‘historians’ skills’, techniqueswhich we can see now, in passing, as but themselves passingmoments in that combination of factors that make histories. (Inother words history is not about ‘skills’.) So, armed with thesesorts of practices, the historian can get down more directly to‘make up’ some history – ‘making histories’.

Fourth, in going about their work of finding various materialsto work on and ‘work up’, historians shuttle between otherhistorians’ published work(s) (stored up labour-time asembodied in books, articles, etc.) and unpublished materials.This unpublished ‘newish’ material can be called the traces ofthe past (literally the remaining marks from the past – docu-ments, records, artefacts, etc.), these traces being a mixture ofthe known (but little used) trace, new, unused and possiblyunknown traces, and old traces; that is, materials used beforebut, because of the newish/new traces found, now capable ofbeing placed in contexts different to those they have occupied

what history is26

before. The historian can then begin to organise all these elem-ents in new (and various) ways – always looking for that longed-for ‘original thesis’ – and so begins to transform the traces of theonce concrete into the ‘concrete in thought’, that is, into histor-ians’ accounts. Here the historian literally re-produces the tracesof the past in a new category and this act of trans-formation –the past into history – is his/her basic job.

Fifth, having done their research, historians then have to writeit up. This is where the epistemological, methodological andideological factors agains come into play, interconnecting witheveryday practices, as they will have done throughout theresearch phases. Obviously such pressures of the everyday willvary but some include:

1 Pressures from family and/or friends (‘Not another week-end working!’ ‘Can’t you give your work a rest?’);

2 Pressures from the work-place, where the various influ-ences of heads of faculty, departmental heads, peer group,institutional research policies and, dare it be said, theobligation to teach students, all bear down;

3 Pressures from publishers with regard to several factors:

wordage: the constraints on wordage are considerable andhave effects. Think how different historical knowledgecould be were all books a third shorter or four timeslonger than ‘normal’ size!

format: the size of page, print, with or without illustra-tions, with or without exercises, bibliography, index,etc.; in looseleaf, with accompanying tape or video – allthese have effects too.

market: who the historian sees as his/her market willinfluence what is said and how: think how the FrenchRevolution of 1789 would have to be ‘different’ foryoung school children, sixth-formers, non-Europeans,‘revolutionary specialists’, the interested layman.

what history is 27

deadlines: how long the writer has in total to do theresearch and write it up, and how that time is allocated(one day a week, a term off, at weekends) affects, say,the availability of sources, the historian’s concentration,etc. Again, the sorts of conditions the publisher setsregarding completion are often crucial.

literary style: how the historian writes (polemically, dis-cursively, flamboyantly, pedantically, and in combin-ations of these) and the grammatical, syntactical andsemantic reach, all affect the account and may well haveto be modified to fit the publisher’s house-style, seriesformat, etc.

referees: publishers send manuscripts to readers who maycall for drastic changes in terms of the organisation ofmaterial (this text, for example, was originally nearlytwice as long); again, some referees have been known tohave axes to grind.

re-writing: at all stages until the text goes to print re-writings take place. Sometimes sections will requirethree drafts, sometimes thirteen. Bright ideas thatseemed initially to say it all become weary and flat whenyou have tried to write it all a dozen times; again, thingsyou were originally putting in are left out and thingsleft in often seem hostages to fortune. What kinds ofjudgements are involved here as the writer ‘works’ allthose traces read and noted (often imperfectly) so longbefore?

And so on. Now, these are obvious points (think here how manyoutside factors, that is, factors outside ‘the past’, operate on youand influence what you write in essays and studies), but thething to stress here is that none of these pressures, indeed noneof the processes discussed in this chapter, operated on the eventsbeing accounted for; on, say, manpower planning in the First

what history is28

World War. Here, again, the gaps between the past and historyyawn.

Sixth, what has been written so far has been about the produc-tion of histories. But texts also have to be read; consumed. Just asyou can consume cake, in many different ways (slowly, gulpingit), in a variety of situations (at work, driving a car), in relationto other courses (have you already had enough, is digestionhard) and in a variety of settings (if you’re on a diet, at awedding), none of which ever comes round in exactly the sameway again, so the consumption of a text takes place in contextsthat do not repeat themselves. Quite literally no two readings arethe same. (Sometimes you might write comments in the mar-gins of a text and then, returning to it some time later, notremember why you wrote what you did; yet they are exactly thesame words on the same page, so just how do meanings retainmeaning?) Thus no reading, even by the same person, can beguaranteed to produce the same effects repeatedly, which meansthat authors cannot force their intentions/interpretations on thereader. Conversely, readers cannot fully fathom everything theauthors intend. Further, the same text can be inserted first intoone broad discourse and then into another: there are no logicallimits, each reading is another writing. This is the world of thedeconstructionist text where any text, in other contexts, canmean many things. Here is a ‘world of difference’.

And yet these last remarks seem to raise a problem (but onyour reading did a problem arise for you; and is yours differentto mine?). The problem raised for me is this: although the aboveseems to suggest that all is interpretive flux, in fact we ‘read’ infairly predictable ways. So, in that sense, what pins readingsdown? Well, not detailed agreement on all and everythingbecause the details will always float free – specific things canalways be made to mean more or less – but general agreementsdo occur. They do so because of power; here we return to ideol-ogy. For what arguably stops texts from being used in totally

what history is 29

arbitrary ways is the fact that certain texts are nearer to sometexts than others; are more or less locatable into genres, intoslots; are more or less congenial to the needs that people(s) haveand which are expressed in texts. And so, après Orwell, they findaffinities and fixing posts (booklists, recommended readings,Dewey numbers) that are themselves ultimately arbitrary, butwhich relate to the more permanent needs of groups and classes:we live in a social system – not a social random. This is a compli-cated but essential area to consider and you might note heretexts by theorists such as Scholes, Eagleton, Fish and Bennett,wherein how this might well work is discussed.17 You might alsoreflect upon how this somewhat baffling situation – of the way-ward text which does not logically have to settle down butwhich does so in practice – relates to an interpretive anxietywhich students often have. Their anxiety is this: if you under-stand that history is what historians make; that they make it onslender evidence; that history is inescapably interpretive and thatthere are at least half a dozen sides to every argument so thathistory is relative, then you might think well, if it seems justinterpretation and nobody really knows, then why bother doingit? If it is all relative what is the point? This is a state of mind wemight call ‘hapless relativism’.

In a sense this way of looking at things is a positive one. It isliberating, for it throws out old certainties and those who havebenefited from them are capable of being exposed. And in asense everything is relative (historicist). But, liberating or not,this still sometimes leaves people feeling as if they are in a deadend. Yet there is no need to. To deconstruct other peoples’ histor-ies is the precondition of constructing your own in ways whichsuggest you know what you are doing; in ways which remindyou that history is always history for someone. For although, as Ihave said, logically all accounts are problematic and relative, thepoint is that some are actually dominant and others marginal. Allare logically the same but in actuality they are different; they are

what history is30

in evaluative (albeit ultimately groundless) hierarchies. Thequestion then becomes ‘why?’ and the answer is because know-ledge is related to power and that, within social formations,those with the most power distribute and legitimate ‘know-ledge’ vis-à-vis interests as best they can. This is the way out ofrelativism in theory, by analyses of power in practice, and thus arelativist perspective need not lead to despair but to the be-ginning of a general recognition of how things seem to operate.This is emancipating. Reflexively, you too can make histories.

ON A DEFINITION OF HISTORY

I have just argued that history in the main is what historiansmake. So why the fuss; isn’t this what history is? In a way it is,but obviously not quite. What historians do in a narrow workingsense is fairly easy to describe; we can draw up a job description.The problem, however, comes when this activity gets inserted,as it must, back into the power relations within any social for-mation out of which it comes; when different people(s),groups and classes ask: ‘What does history mean for me/us,and how can it be used or abused?’ It is here, in usages andmeanings, that history becomes so problematic; when the ques-tion ‘What is history?’ becomes, as I have explained, ‘Who ishistory for?’ This is the bottom line; so, what is history for me?A definition:

History is a shifting, problematic discourse, ostensibly aboutan aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a groupof present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culturesalaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recog-nisable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically,ideologically and practically positioned and whose products,once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and abusesthat are logically infinite but which in actuality generally

what history is 31

correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any givenmoment and which structure and distribute the meanings ofhistories along a dominant-marginal spectrum.18

what history is32

2ON SOME QUESTIONS AND

SOME ANSWERS

Having given a definition of history I now want to work itsuch that it might give answers to the sort of basic questionsthat often arise with regard to the nature of history. Becausethis text is short my comments will be brief; but brief or not, Ihope that the answers I will be suggesting point both in thedirection and to the way in which more sophisticated,nuanced and qualified responses can be made. Besides, I thinka guide such as this (a sort of ‘rough guide to history’) isneeded, not least because, although questions on the nature ofhistory are regularly raised, the tendency is to leave them openso that you can then ‘make up your own mind’. Now I toowant that, but I am aware that very often the various ‘nature ofhistory’ debates are perceived only dimly (I mean there seemsso many alternatives to fit in, so many possible orderings ofthe basic constituents) such that some doubt and confusioncan remain. So for a change as it were, here are some ques-tions and some answers.

1 What is the status of truth in the discourses of history?2 Is there any such thing as an objective history (are there

objective ‘facts’ etc.), or is history just interpretation?3 What is bias and what are the problems involved in trying

to get rid of it?4 What is empathy; can it be done, how, why, and if it

cannot be achieved, why does it seem so important to try?5 What are the differences between primary and secondary

sources (traces) and between ‘evidence’ and ‘sources’:what is at stake here?

6 What do you do with those couplets (cause and effect,continuity and change, similarity and difference) and is itpossible to do what you are asked to do through usingthem?

7 Is history an art or a science?

ON TRUTH

It may look as if I have dealt already with whether we can knowthe truth of the past. I have run arguments from Elton and otherswhere the aim of historical study is to gain real (true) know-ledge, and suggested this is, strictly speaking, unachievable.Again I have tried to show the epistemological, methodological,ideological and practical reasons why this is so. However, I thinkthat two remaining areas still need to be explored so that previ-ous points can be developed: first, if we cannot ultimately knowthe truths of the past then why do we keep searching for themand, second, how does the term ‘truth’ – irrespective of whetheror not there is any such thing – function in the discourses ofhistory?

So why do we need truth? At one level the answer seemsobvious. For without it certaintist concepts – objectivity,essence, essential, unbiased, etc. – which fix things and closethem down, would be powerless. Without objectivity how do

on some questions and some answers34

we discriminate between rival accounts of the same phenom-enon; more mundanely, how can we actually decide what werethe most important causes of the 1832 Reform Act? These sortsof worries seem to haunt us.

But why? Beyond the immediately practical, where does thisdesire for certainty come from? The reasons are many, rangingfrom generalisations about the ‘western tradition’ to psycho-social fears of ‘loss’ before uncertainty. The often-quotedcomment by the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, that the domin-ant philosophical tradition in the west (‘The Western Tradition’)is a series of footnotes to Plato explains much, given Plato’s viewthat absolute knowledge (of justice, of virtue, of the best polity)in its pure forms was possible and could be ascertained throughphilosophical argument (with the implication that it would notbe rational to act non-virtuously if one knew what virtue was; aview that good/true knowledge ought to entail good/true prac-tice). Also crucial are Christian arguments that the word of Godwas the word of Truth, and that knowing Him was knowingTruth; that Christianity provides criteria for judging everythingand everyone on the scales of right and wrong. Additionally,constant attempts within western thought in so many of itsmanifestations (philosophy, theology, aesthetics, etc.) to formu-late some connection between word and world through corre-spondence theories of truth, long kept a destructive scepticism(sophism, nominalism, anti-foundationalism) somewhat at bay.The development of rationality and science and the fact thatscience really does seem ‘to work’ are further contributing fac-tors. Add to them that in everyday life truth and its synonyms arein common usage (‘tell the truth’; ‘did you truly say that?’; ‘howcan I trust you?’; ‘are you absolutely certain?’); add to that one’sexperiences of education (‘who can give me the correct answer?’‘do it again, it’s wrong’); add to that all those certaintist ticks andcrosses on all those exercise books; and add to that all thosetextbooks that intimidate us because we cannot see how their

on some questions and some answers 35

‘contents’ have been made – in all these ways truth seems natur-ally at hand.

But in a culture nothing is natural. Today we know of nofoundations for Platonic absolutes. Today we live with the idea ofGod’s absence. We have deconstructed and made arbitrary andpragmatic the connections between word and world. We haveseen, this century, the incapacity of reason to demonstrably dis-empower irrationalism. Although physicists and engineers geton with their work and their hypothetico-deductive reasonings,the grounds for their success remain enigmatic: ‘Why it shouldbe that the external world, in the naïve, obvious sense, shouldconcur with the regularity-postulates, with the mathematicaland rule-bound expectations of investigative rationalism, no oneknows.’1 And we understand, of course, the ‘common sense’, ofpersistent habitual homilies, long after the reasons for them havegone: ‘We still speak of “sunrise” and “sunset”. We do so as ifthe Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced,ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures ofspeech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught,tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our commonparlance.’2

All this then, if we can still use the word, we know. We are (ourculture is) a-moral, sceptical, ironic, secular. We are partnerswith uncertainty; we have disturbed truth, have tracked itdown and found it to be a linguistic sign, a concept. Truth is aself-referencing figure of speech, incapable of accessing thephenomenal world: word and world, word and object, remainseparate. Let us examine now these points in general terms, andthen relate them to that similar separation between the phenom-enal past and discursive history and so draw this first question toa close.

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault points to both theabsurdity and yet the practicality of correspondences betweenwords and things:

on some questions and some answers36

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of thelaughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiarlandmarks of thought – our thought, the thought that bears thestamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all theordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accus-tomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and con-tinuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapseour age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. Thispassage quotes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia’ in which it iswritten that animals are divided into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor(b) embalmed(c) tame(d) sucking pigs(e) sirens(f) fabulous(g) stray dogs(h) included in the present classification(i) frenzied(j) innumerable(k) drawn with a very fine camel-haired brush(l) et cetera(m) having just broken the water pitcher(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend inone great leap, the thing that . . . is demonstrated as the exoticcharm of another system of thought, is the limitation of ourown, the stark impossibility of [us] thinking that.3

Foucault’s point is clear. It is the arbitrariness of the definition,one that looks so odd to us but not to the encyclopaedist towhom it literally made sense whilst, of course, any definition weoffered would look odd to him/her. What is missing here then is

on some questions and some answers 37

any necessary connection between word and world. Thus theliterary and cultural theorist, George Steiner:

It is this break . . . between word and world which constitutesone of the very few genuine revolutions . . . in Western his-tory. . . . The word rose has neither stem nor leaf nor thorn. It isneither pink nor red nor yellow. It exudes no odour. It is, per se,a wholly arbitrary marker, an empty sign. Nothing whatever . . .in its phonemic components, etymological history or grammat-ical functions, has any correspondence whatever to what webelieve or imagine to be the object of its purely conventionalreference.4

This ‘break’ has been underlined by the American pragmatistRichard Rorty, commenting that about two hundred years agoEuropeans realised that truth was always created and neverfound.5 Yet, despite the slippage between word and world, anddespite the fact that all meanings/truths are created in contin-gent circumstances, things do, nevertheless, seem to corres-pond. But why, given that in our sceptical-ironic situation theyneed not do so? Well, for the reasons I have mentioned: that ourculture has a long, dominant tradition wherein truth and cer-tainty have been held to be found and not created – Platonism,Christianity, reason, science, the habits of everyday life; and, as Iindicated in the last chapter, because of Orwellian/ideologicalaffinities that still manage to hold off theoretical nihilism bytheir certaintist practices. For ultimately what has stopped any-thing being said, and has allowed only specific things to run, ispower: truth is dependent on somebody having the power tomake it true. This is how the concept of truth is made to func-tion (as I say irrespective of whether such ‘truths’ are really trueor not) as a censor. Here, in Power/Knowledge, Foucault makes thispoint:

on some questions and some answers38

Truth isn’t outside power . . . it is produced only by virtue ofmultiple forms of constraint. . . . Each society has . . . its ‘gen-eral politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which itaccepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms andinstances which enable one to distinguish true and false state-ments, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniquesand procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; thestatus of those who are charged with saying what counts astrue.

. . . by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which areto be discovered and accepted’ but rather ‘the ensemble ofrules according to which the true and the false are separatedand specific effects of power attached to the true’, it beingunderstood also that it is not a matter . . . ‘on behalf ’ of thetruth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economicand political role it plays.

‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered pro-cedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulationand operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked . . . with systemsof power which produce and sustain it. . . . A ‘regime oftruth’.6

All these arguments are readily applicable to history. History is adiscourse, a language game; within it ‘truth’ and similar ex-pressions are devices to open, regulate and shut down interpret-ations. Truth acts as a censor – it draws the line. We know thatsuch truths are really ‘useful fictions’ that are in discourse byvirtue of power (somebody has to put and keep them there) andpower uses the term ‘truth’ to exercise control: regimes oftruth. Truth prevents disorder, and it is this fear of disorder(of the disorderly) or, to put this positively, it is this fear offreedom (for the unfree) that connects it functionally to materialinterests.

on some questions and some answers 39

ON FACTS AND INTERPRETATION

The question of facts and/versus interpretation is typically for-mulated thus: are there historical facts that we can definitelyknow (for example dates) or is history ‘just interpretation’?

Are there ‘past things’ that seem to be factually correct? Inone sense one can say yes. Thus, we know that the so-calledGreat War/First World War happened between 1914 and1918. We know that Margaret Thatcher came into power in1979. If these are facts then we know facts. However, suchfacts, though important, are ‘true’ but trite within the largerissues historians consider. For historians are not too concernedabout discrete facts (facts as individual facts), for such a con-cern only touches that part of historical discourse called itschronicle. No, historians have ambitions, wishing to discovernot only what happened but how and why and what thesethings meant and mean. This is the task historians have set forthemselves (I mean they did not have to raise the stakes sohigh). So it is never really a matter of the facts per se but theweight, position, combination and significance they carry vis-à-vis each other in the construction of explanations that is atissue. This is the inevitable interpretive dimension, the prob-lematic, as historians transform the events of the past intopatterns of meaning that any literal representation of them asfacts could never produce. For although there may be methodsof finding out ‘what happened’ there is no method whatsoeverwhereby one can definitely say what the ‘facts’ mean. HereSteiner is again relevant. A text, says Steiner, in as much as itscomponents are

phonetic, grammatical and lexical . . . can be studied analytic-ally and statistically. . . . But . . . the absolutely decisive failingoccurs when such approaches seek to formalise meaning, whenthey proceed upward from the phonetic . . . to the semantic. . . .

on some questions and some answers40

It is this progression which no analytic-linguistic technique . . .has ever taken convincingly.7

Clearly this applies to history as discourse. In that the past is atext (full of ‘old’ texts) to be read and made meaning-full(remember again the view read as geography), then critiques ofthe limits of any textuality apply. There is no method of establish-ing incorrigible meanings; all facts to be meaningful needembedding in interpretive readings that obviously contain thembut which do not simply somehow arise from them; to the chag-rin of empiricists the fact-value dichotomy allows/demands this.8

Working historians clearly ought to recognise these argu-ments. Often they do not, or, if they do, they rarely work them.Historians often seem to assume that interpretations just doderive from the ‘always already there facts’, and that what isactually a temporary and local interpretation really is true/accurate as such; that at ‘the centre’ lie the facts of the matter insome given, uninterpreted way.

Now this may appear a little abstract, so let me show what is atstake here by an example.

In a recent (popular) short article9 the historian RobertSkidelsky wrote on the very problem we have been discussing.In it he stressed that most historical facts are not in dispute, thatrelativism poses no threat to the orderly discussion of a basicallyagreed body of knowledge and that over most of ‘our’ inter-pretations of the past shared values and views predominate.Skidelsky agreed that interpretive activity goes on but arguedthat it is located on the margins where it does not call intoquestion that shared centre; indeed, it is from such a centre thatone adjudicates between rival (marginal) perspectives.

In putting this view so clearly Skidelsky speaks for many his-torians and what he is saying can be briefly illustrated. Onemight say that we know the basic facts about the inter-war yearsin Europe; we know what happened, when and to a large extent

on some questions and some answers 41

why it happened. Debates have taken place around this con-sensus – about Munich, appeasement, etc. – but these respect thefacts and seek to re-address them only marginally. Often thesedebates are linked to specific historians (D. C. Watt, A. J. P. Taylor)and this is called the historiographical dimension. That is, histor-ians re-interpret odd bits of the inter-war years and this is his-toriographical in that students can study what historians say.

Now certain things follow from this position, not least that ifhistoriography only takes place on the margins of knowledge,then an approach that sees all history as historiography (myview) is also marginalised (i.e. deemed incorrect). Students, Ihave often heard it said, should stop looking at what historianssay and concentrate on what actually happened; they should dosome ‘proper’ history. But this runs counter to all I have beensaying. If history is interpretation, if history is historians’work(s), then historiography is what the ‘proper’ study of his-tory is actually about. In my argument everything is a discursiveconstruct, including the Skidelsky-like non-interpreted centre;that is, the so-called centre is just a congealed interpretation.Here then lies a major difference between Skidelsky and othersand myself. I would like to put forward the following argumentto support my point of view.

Using the inter-war period again, my position is as follows.Skidelsky among others would argue that a large body of agreedfactual knowledge about 1918–39 exists. Around the edges bitsare re-worked, but the main body stands. And it is not unusualfor these authors to characterise these marginal debates to bebetween ‘left’ and ‘right’. This model can be shown thus:

on some questions and some answers42

Here the balanced centre looks undisputed. And it suggests that a‘balanced’ historian occupying this centre can look objectively atthe points for and against the opposing views of left and rightand weigh them up. One can be ‘liberal’ (non-ideological) inthis centre because the ideological positions are out there, on theleft and right, and if one or the other wins then this will cause animbalance. One can adjudicate disinterestedly from this centre:‘on the one hand – on the other’.

But reconsider. Let me now put the left, centre and right on acontinuous spectrum. Thus the old model,

becomes

Here we immediately see that the centre is not really a centre ofanything. Rather, what we have is an ensemble of left/centre/right positions towards one end of a given (and logically infin-ite) spectrum. Hence, when one allegedly answers in a balancedway from the ‘centre’, one wants to know the centre of what?For shift the left/centre/right ensemble anywhere on the spec-trum and see how the centre is not so much de-centred as the

on some questions and some answers 43

whole concept becomes problematic: a spectrum cannot have acentre.

If this still appears a little vague let me tighten the rachet afurther notch. One might ask whether, in England today,marginal/oppositional interpretations, to which we can add andwhich we can judge, revolve around a Marxist-Leninist centre?

I think the answer is no. But why not? After all there are a greatmany Marxist-Leninist accounts of 1918–39 around (onfascism, the causes of the Great Patriotic War etc.), so whyisn’t this the (non-interpretative/given) centre around whichother accounts are but marginal interpretations? This is notan unrealistic example because in the USSR Marxist-Leninistaccounts were in the centre. In the USSR our ‘shared’ centre was‘bourgeois’; was on their margins. In other words ‘our’ centre isjust ‘ours’. Skidelsky’s argument, that our centre is effectivelyeveryone’s (universal) and that there really is a centre that is notjust another position, seems fallacious. Rather I think there areno centres as such, but local patterns of dominance and margin-ality, which are all historiographically constructed and whichmust be historiographically read. As for all of us, Skidelsky andthe specific discourse he occupies (and which in that sense‘occupies him’; that is, makes him the historian he is) positionshim, and if we are right about the ideological nature ofpositions, positions ideologically too: remember there are nohistories that are not for someone. Let us now move on to thequestion of bias.

ON BIAS

The concept of historical (historians’) bias is everywhere: inschools, in the aims/objectives of countless history syllabi, at Alevel, in universities and in fact in almost any assessment ofhistorical texts. It is overtly signalled or tacitly assumed withregard to the reading of documents, primary and secondary

on some questions and some answers44

traces and evidence. In effect bias (and its detection) is taken tobe something that is very meaningful. But is it? Let me run a fivestage argument.10

First, bias makes sense only if it is used in opposition tounbiased; i.e. some sort of objectivity, even truth: unbiased =running true, as in the game of bowls (can you not see theproblem ‘of bias’ already?)

Second, in historical work, bias appears most regularly inempiricist history, that is, history of a specific type. Empiricisthistory is committed to the idea that somehow the past can bere-created objectively. Typically the historian goes to the originaltraces, constructs these as evidence, scrupulously footnotes, etc.,and on the basis of this gives a fully documented account. Ofcourse empiricists – like Elton – know that definitive accountsare unachievable but they still aim for them. The ambition is tolet the facts speak ‘for themselves’, unmediated by the bulk ofthe ventriloquist-like (and possibly biased) historian.

Because this type of approach has objectivity at its centre thenwithin it bias makes sense. Here bias means the skewing ofsources to fit an argument, the withholding of documents, thefalsification of evidence . . .

But, and this is point three, history can be things other thanempiricist (think back here only to Marwick’s twenty-five var-ieties). So, for example, history can be seen as the way groups/classes make sense of the past by making it theirs: here the pastcan be constructed meaningfully for Marxists, right-radicals, fem-inists, etc. Of course, within each of these constructs there willbe checking mechanisms for validating the readings given (ref-erences in footnotes to sources, etc.) but within these discoursesthe word ‘bias’ hardly appears. Thus within, say, Marxism, onewill see references to many different (party) lines: one mightread of voluntarist or economistic tendencies, Gramscian orAlthusserian readings, Trotskyist deviations and so on. But theselines will not be referred to as biases because everyone knows

on some questions and some answers 45

that Gramscians will use the past differently to economisticMarxists, so what sense does it make to say Gramsci ‘was biased’– against what unbiased account? A Trotskyist one, a bourgeoisone – the facts?

Point four. Looking at history this way – as a series of readingsall of which are positioned – then there is clearly no unposi-tioned criterion by which one can judge the degree of bias. Infact it arguably makes little sense to use the term generally – tosay for instance that feminists are biased – for they merely haveto ask if that judgement is made from a patriarchal position. Notonly that. The empiricist claim – that one can detect bias andexpunge it by attending scrupulously to ‘what the sources say’ –is undercut by the fact that sources are mute. It is historians whoarticulate whatever the ‘sources say’, for do not many historiansall going (honestly and scrupulously in their own ways) to thesame sources, still come away with different accounts; do nothistorians all have their own many narratives to tell?

Point five accordingly becomes a question and an answer to it.The question is: but if this is the case, if bias best makes sense (a)within empiricism and (b) if its claims to get to the truththrough some source-led account is problematic and (c) if blan-ket statements of the type ‘feminists are just biased’ makes littlesense, then why is the term ‘bias’ in general use? I think theanswer could be that:

1 Bias is ‘central’ to the empiricist mode.2 This mode (getting the facts to speak allegedly for them-

selves) is connected, not logically or necessarily but histor-ically (contingently) to liberalism. Here one learns toadjudicate, to weigh things up and to see both sides; hereone can pursue the past for its own sake (for the love of it)as it apparently speaks unaided. This mode is ensconced inschools, colleges, universities: it is, is it not, the dominantmode in our social formation.

on some questions and some answers46

3 Because this mode is dominant it therefore acts as if itsway of doing things is the only way: it universalises itself.But in so doing empiricism not only universalises its (rela-tive) successes but its failures too. As we know, empiri-cism’s major problem is the ascertaining of truth in thatit recognises its truths to be, ultimately, interpretation. Itdoes not want to face this; so to ward off this reality itholds to the notion of the true account, claiming suchtruth is attainable if bias is detected and wiped away. But ifeverything is ultimately interpretation and if one person’sbias is another person’s truth, what then? Thus, the prob-lem of bias is specifically an empiricist one but because itis the dominant approach then its problems get distrib-uted as if they were everyone’s. But they are not. Of course– and this must be stressed – other discourses have theirown problems of internal coherence, etc., but bias is notthe way they are expressed.

To conclude. Students in our culture are likely to meet the con-cept of bias everywhere even though it is problematic onlysomewhere. Bias, if and when it is used, ought to be used specif-ically and locally. (As it is, it is used ideologically.) Elsewhere,because what is constructed as history is constructed differently,the problems of veracity are dealt with differently too.

ON EMPATHY

Empathy, like bias, is a term you will surely have met before.11

Here the basic question is whether empathy – the claim that onehas to get into an informed appreciation of the predicaments andviewpoints of people in the past in order to gain real historicalunderstanding (to see the past from its point of view) – is actu-ally possible? If it is not, and that is my view, then why shouldattempting the impossible be so high on the agenda? I will

on some questions and some answers 47

approach ‘empathy’ by looking initially at why I think empathiz-ing effectively is impossible; second I will examine the pressuresthat have put it so high on the agenda; and finally I will offersome concluding thoughts.

I consider empathy is unachievable for four reasons. Two arebasically philosophical and two are practical.

The philosophical problem of ‘other minds’, as discussed byWittgenstein and others,12 considers whether it is possible toenter into the mind of another person we know well and who isbeside one, and concludes that it is not. Historians, however,have disregarded this conclusion and have continued to raisequestions that are based on the assumption that it actually ispossible to enter lots and lots of minds, even minds we cannotpossibly know well, and which are far away from us in space andtime.

This links into the second philosophical problem. For what iseffectively ignored in empathy is that in every act of communica-tion there is an act of translation going on; that every act ofspeech (speech-act) is an ‘interpretation between privacies’. Andwhen, as suggested, this act of translation is not between ‘youand me’ here and now, but ‘us and them’ somewhere else and atsome other time, then the task is extremely problematic. For toall past events historians bring their own mind-set programmedin the present. As Steiner says:

Croce’s dictum ‘all history is contemporary history’ points dir-ectly to the ontological paradox of the past tense. Historiansare increasingly aware that the conventions of narrative and ofimplicit reality with which they work are philosophically vulner-able. The dilemma exists on at least two levels. The first issemantic. The bulk of the historian’s material consists of utter-ances made in and about the past. Given the perpetual processof linguistic change not only in vocabulary and syntax but inmeaning, how is he to interpret, to translate his sources. . . .

on some questions and some answers48

Reading a historical document, collating the modes of narrativein previous written history, interpreting speech-acts performedin the distant or nearer past, he finds himself becoming moreand more of the translator in the technical sense. . . . And themeaning thus arrived at must be the ‘true one’. By whatmetamorphic magic is the historian to proceed?13

Steiner’s point seems to me to be basic, and he goes on tostress the impossibility of getting into other times: ‘When weuse past tenses . . . when the historian “makes history” (for thatis what he is actually doing), we rely on what I shall call . . .axiomatic fictions’14 (that is, contemporary and overwhelminglydominant assumptions about what in the main constituteshistorical knowledge).

Given then that there is no presuppositionless interpretationof the past, and given that interpretations of the past are con-structed in the present, the possibility of the historian being ableto slough off his present to reach somebody else’s past on theirterms looks remote. This is a point picked up by Terry Eagletonin Criticism and Ideology where he poses the same problem for theliterary critic. The job of the literary critic is, it seems, to tell uswhat the text under study is about; to make it better understoodso that it is easier to read. But in helping the reader to read better(just as the historian’s putative task is to help us read the pastbetter) how, asks Eagleton, can the interpreter’s (historian’s)bulk not get in the way? Here is Eagleton on the problem ofreading texts – I have added the bracketed words:

It is difficult to see criticism [history] as anything but an inno-cent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existencenatural: there is literature [the past] and so – because we wishto understand and appreciate it – there is also criticism [his-tory]. . . . But . . . criticism [history] as a hand- maiden to litera-ture [the past] prevents [such understanding] everywhere. . . . If

on some questions and some answers 49

the task of criticism [history] is to smooth the troubled passagebetween text [the past] and reader, to elaborate the text [past] sothat it may be more easily consumed, how is it to avoid inter-posing its own ungainly bulk between product and consumer,over-shadowing its object. . . . It seems that criticism [history] iscaught here in an insoluble contradiction.15

These then are some of the philosophical problems empathyfaces: of the ‘translation between privacies’, of the ‘ontologicalparadox of the past tense’; of the present-minded historiangetting ‘back to the past’ uncluttered by all that has made him/her modern. Further to these problems, empathy has two prac-tical difficulties to overcome.

The first is a reminder of the discussions in chapter 1 regard-ing history as theory/practice. In theory the historian is workingwithin all kinds of assumptions of an epistemological, method-ological and ideological kind, and we have also seen the practicalproblems of making histories (the long weekends, pressuresfrom work, publishers, literary style . . .), all of which areinscribed (written into) the historian’s own mind. How then isthis – the very stuff that allows the historian to think historicallyin the first place – to be got rid of so that he/she can think ‘thepast’ (‘pastically’)?

The second problem we might consider is one arising if wetransfer the points we have made into a class situation/examination. Let us imagine we are facing an empathy question;we are to try and empathise with Thomas Cromwell’s intentionto reform Tudor government. What did he see as the problems;how did he see the situation?

As students we might read about Cromwell; we might read(again) Elton or other authorities. We might also read docu-ments relevant to the debate. We may disagree with some inter-pretations (enter into the debate) but if we are to remain with itwe really must stay in this discursive field. Along comes the

on some questions and some answers50

question; what were Cromwell’s intentions? Now, we cannotempathise directly with Cromwell because we have reached himindirectly (via Elton) so actually we are empathising less withCromwell’s mind than Elton’s. This is underlined when we areasked to put Cromwell’s intentions into the meaning-makingcontext. For if in, say, educational institutions, it is in historyclasses that much of that context is provided (a context theteacher gets from Elton too) and if this is about all the contextyou as students know (and if you were listening all the time,accurately translating the teacher’s speech acts, and if you canstill find your notes to read) then requests to put Cromwell intoan early sixteenth-century context are actually requests to puthim into the context of your class experience. Here we areempathising with what the teacher has in his/her own mindmediated by classroom contingencies; that is, with Elton manytimes removed. If this were an examination, then checks madeby external examiners on the answers so produced are checksagainst what is in their minds; and so it goes on.

Thus I do not think empathy, as typically understood, ispossible for these philosophical and practical reasons, which wehave touched on only lightly here. Through a lot of critical read-ing historians may gain ‘tentative understandings’ but that is adifferent matter, and empathy may be marginal in reaching suchknowledge. But the point I would like to make here is a differentone. As far as I can see, empathy is on the agenda for reasonsother than giving you the opportunity to try and do it. Empathyis with us for reasons which come not out of epistemological/methodological problems as such but from three disparatepressures, one of which comes out of schooling, one of whichcomes from an academic direction, and one of which is clearlyideological.

Let us begin by looking at the pressure of schooling. Thispressure emerged largely through educational notions of rele-vance and personal involvement that started initially in primary

on some questions and some answers 51

schools and then became extended. Thus, think here of thoseimaginative leaps we might well have been asked to make so thatwe could pretend to be a fox, a snowflake, an angry king: suchappeals were (and are) to make pupils feel involved and engaged;to personalise teaching and learning. Then, with the extension ofcomprehensivisation from primary to secondary schools andwith the attendant problems of classroom organisation anddiscipline, so the general trend has been toward the breakdownof hierarchies (streaming etc.) towards an equal (personal)entitlement to the same (whole) curriculum. Today, this person-alisation of pedagogy (teaching-learning) has led to personal-ised assessment procedures (designer assessment) and in someways the end of this process is approaching: personal profilingand one’s own positive/negotiated record of achievement signi-fying the end of hierarchical (once and for all) examinations(people at the top, people at the bottom). Accordingly, in thisdemocratising context where all pupils bring their equally valid/valued opinions to school, then opportunities for their ex-pression must be encouraged: what do they think of the past,what is history for them, what is their explanation – let them tryand put themselves into the mind-set of (their) medieval prince.This is a bespoke syllabus, made to measure, cut to fit. In every-day practice this is the world of individual tasks, of separateworksheets, of the personal topic, of the private study, of theproject, of the dissertation . . . such approaches here spill overinto the academic.

The second pressure is the academic. In England this pressurerelies heavily on the specific way of looking at history (idealism)which is associated with the historian R. G. Collingwood. In anutshell, Collingwood argued that all history is the history ofmind, an apparently difficult concept to grasp (and use) whenretained within Collingwood’s own sophisticated discourse, butwhen summarised easily understood, not least because by nowmuch of the argument will be familiar.

on some questions and some answers52

This, briefly, is Collingwood’s argument. Humans are lan-guage animals. Through language things are given meaning.These symbolic codes (languages) refer to the world but wordand world are categorically different. In different social forma-tions, in different cultures, people speak/spoke differently: thepast is a foreign country – people spoke differently there. AsSteiner puts it:

Different civilisations, different epochs do not necessarily pro-duce the same ‘speech mass’; certain cultures speak less thanothers; some modes of sensibility prize taciturnity and elision,others reward prolixity and semantic ornamentation.16

So, for instance, the actual/potential vocabulary of medievalpeasant or viking was minuscule compared to ours today. Tounderstand the medieval peasant/viking is thus to understandtheir discourses through the examination of the surviving tracesof them: field patterns, monastic records, chronicles, etc.; theseare manifestations of their intentions and concerns, embodi-ments of these people’s needs; who wanted them for certainthings. In effect understanding history for Collingwood is there-fore understanding why these people wanted these things andnothing else: in a phrase, all history is about the history of whatthey had in mind; all history is thus the history of mind(s).Consequently, to gain historical knowledge we must get insidesuch cultural remains/traces to the minds that infused themwith life, to see the world as they did. Accordingly it is thisidealist pressure, variously construed, that legitimates theempathetic approach for many historians, and indeed for somethis academic argument is what empathy really is. But I thinkthere is more to it than that. For empathy as constructed byschooling and idealism needs ideology to complete it. And cru-cially so. Because it is in ideology that the major characteristicsof empathy are found. This ideology is liberal, and not any kind

on some questions and some answers 53

of liberalism either, but one harking back to, and thus being bestexplained by, a brief résumé of J. S. Mill’s idea of reciprocalfreedom.

Central to Mill’s idea of freedom was the notion that theindividual could do what he/she desired so long as the exerciseof that desire did not curtail the liberty of others. To calculate ifthis would occur as a consequence of any action, the person(agent) had to imagine what these consequences would be; toput himself/herself into other people’s positions; to see theirpoint of view. In doing so this calculation would have to be bothrational and universalisable, capable of rational reciprocation forall involved. For if the person(s) affected were ever in a positionto do the same thing back to the agent then mutual harm couldoccur. This therefore suggested a pragmatic weighing up and abalancing of viewpoints, a consideration of the pros and cons(on the one hand – on the other) and the banishment of allextremes as rational choices for action.

This approach – being rational, seeing other people’s viewsand balancing the options and thus the possibly hurtful con-sequences of extreme actions (extremism) – is thus what liesbehind all those requests to put oneself into another person’sposition (in the past); to try to see things from their perspective,to rationally calculate their options and to be ‘open minded’.This is why, of course, so many empathy questions are problem-solving exercises.

In the middle of this activity, then, is rationality and balance.Here, empathy draws all reasonable people into the centre. Hereliberal ideology is at work, working to construct us as liberals.Consequently it is doubtful if this produces what this exercise isostensibly about – understanding history. Rather the reverse, forwhat this approach does is to universalise throughout space andtime a very local and time-bound ideology, liberalism, to thecalculation of interests per se, thus putting into the minds of allpeople (including medieval peasants and vikings who did not

on some questions and some answers54

know of liberalism and who had unfortunately never had thepleasure of reading J. S. Mill) Mill’s own mind.

This is ironic. The only way to bring people in the past (whowere so different to us) under our control is to make them thesame as us, propelled everywhere by rational calculation, liberalstyle. Here at the heart of the argument that this is the wayof gaining historical understanding we find the very essenceof what it means to think a-historically; quite literallyanachronistically.

So schooling, idealism and ideology thus constitute empathy,and these are three pressures that do not sit easily together. Thepedagogy of personal involvement puts a stress on the imagin-ation that most historians see as suspiciously ‘fictional’, whilstthe problem between idealism – with its stress on the strange-ness of the past – and liberal ideology, which stresses the con-stancy of human beings/human nature homo economicus style, arereally quite different views as to how (and why) ‘knowledge’ ofthe past is possible. And in fact this last point helps explain why,at the moment of writing, empathy is one of the most discussedaspects of ‘what history is’, an ideological discussion that needsto be understood in order to see both what is going on and whyso much seems to be at stake politically in these matters.

As we have seen, the attempt to get into the otherness of thepast is, for idealists, what is at the centre of historical study. Butthis requires some imagining, no matter how much one isenriched by understandings of that past, and it is this stress onimagination that has been attacked. This attack has come mainlyfrom liberal and right-wing empiricists. For they think (if I maygeneralise) that empathy is basically a waste of time. As empiri-cists they want to get to ‘the facts’ and thus ‘know’ the past thatway, but they also know that most of the facts are missing so thatknowledge ultimately eludes them. So, to make their accounts asfull as possible, they have to do their own bit of imagining(interpreting) to fill the gaps. Here the problem is that if people

on some questions and some answers 55

in the past thought all kinds of odd things, then how can histor-ians imagine accurately? The answer has been to deny that odd-ness of people in the past, and to stress the ‘constancy of humannature’ argument which says that, stripped of their culture, allpeople are and always have been basically the same. That wayyou can then fill in the gaps accurately because you work on theassumption that faced with the same situation all people wouldact predictably by (somehow) throwing off their cultural strait-jackets and acting naturally. Consequently you don’t needempathy – you don’t need idealism – because these ideasencourage you to imagine that people in the past are alwaysculture-bound, are never natural, and therefore that you cannever really know what they had in mind.

From the liberal-right empiricist position this is the problem,for two reasons. First, it can lead to relativistic scepticism. Sec-ond, it may lead to the possibility of people today imagining thatother (universalisable) responses were made by people in thepast – say, socialist ones. In fact much of the empathy debate hasbeen tied up with these critiques of ‘left interpretation’; aboutwhether these imaginative spaces that will always exist will befilled by the correct ‘human nature’ or not. My own thoughts onthis and on empathy in general are as follows.

I think people in the past were very different to us in themeanings they gave to their world, and that any reading on tothem of a constancy of human nature type, of whatever kind, iswithout foundation. I mean, which sort of human nature do youwant to pick? I don’t think this need lead to scepticism aboutknowing ‘history’ because, to repeat, when we study history weare not studying the past but what historians have constructedabout the past. In that sense, whether or not people in the pasthad the same or different natures to us is not only undecidablebut also not at issue. In that sense, the past doesn’t enter into it.Our real need is to establish the presuppositions that historianstake to the past. It would therefore be more constructive (though

on some questions and some answers56

again ultimately impossible) to try and get into the minds ofhistorians rather than the minds of the people who lived in thepast and who only emerge, strictly speaking, through the mindsof historians anyway, a task this whole book is encouraging. Notso much ‘all history as the history of past people’s minds’ then,but ‘all history as the history of historian’s minds’.

ON PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES;ON SOURCES AND EVIDENCE

Much ink has been spilt over the issue of primary and secondarysources. Clearly there is a difference between primary sources(traces of the past) and secondary texts. As you will know, thisdifference breaks down especially at the secondary level where itis obviously possible to use a secondary text as a primary source.Thus, for instance, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Work-ing Class can be read both as an introduction to aspects of theindustrial revolution and as a study of what a certain kind ofMarxist historian like Thompson had to say about it in the late1950s and early 1960s: same text, different use. But if this isobvious, then why this section on primary and secondarysources: what is the problem?

It is this. I have argued we can never really know the past; thatthere are no centres; that there are no ‘deeper’ sources (no sub-text) to draw upon to get things right: all is on the surface. As wesaw in chapter 1, in doing research historians do not go downbut across, moving laterally in the construction of their accountsfrom one set of sources to another, effectively doing comparativework. If this is not seen; if you use the word ‘source’ insteadof ‘trace’; if you refer to some of these sources as primary andif you sometimes replace primary by original (original andthus underlying/fundamental source), this suggests that if yougo to the originals, then because originals seem genuine (asopposed to secondary/second-hand traces), genuine (true/

on some questions and some answers 57

deep) knowledge can be gained. This prioritises the originalsource, fetishises documents, and distorts the whole workingprocess of making history. At root is that perpetual quest fortruth, the quest also apparent in desires for empathetic under-standing – to get back into the genuine minds of the originalpeople so that their views are unadulterated by ours.

If we do not have these ideas, if we are freed from the desirefor certainty, if we are released from the idea that history rests onthe study of primary/documentary sources (and that doing his-tory is studying these alone and that from these originals we canadjudicate later historians’ disagreements), then we are free tosee history as an amalgam of those epistemological, method-ological, ideological and practical concerns I have outlined.

Having made these points, the debate over evidence need notdetain us long. Indeed, were it not for the fact that the ‘problemof evidence’ is part of the Carr-Elton dispute that is still runningand still causing problems in introductory courses on the natureof history, then it really need not detain us at all at this stage.

The point at issue, however, is this. Does the evidence of thepast press itself so irresistibly upon the historian that he/she cando no other than allow it to speak for itself, as Elton has sug-gested, or does evidence, construed now as an absolutely muteresource, need to be quite literally articulated by the historianwho, in putting his or her own voice over the evidence per se,effectively silences it. At stake here, yet again, is the question ofthe type and degree of freedom that the past allows the historianto act as interpreter, expressed, this time, as the ‘evidencequestion’.

This problem can be considered in two ways, the first byseeing that the Carr-Elton rendition of the problem rests on anelementary linguistic confusion, the second by re-articulating,rather differently and suggestively, the past-history distinction.

The reason why this specific debate over evidence rests on aterminological confusion is that the term evidence is being

on some questions and some answers58

applied, especially by Elton, to the same materials when thesematerials appear in different contexts and therefore need to beunderstood and called different things. Elton uses the term ‘evi-dence’ to describe the sources that the historian goes to whencarrying out research (‘the evidence is in the record’) whereashe ought to have referred to them as, say, traces of the past. Bycalling such traces evidence, however, Elton gives the impression– which of course he wants to give – that such pristine pieces ofevidence always already organise themselves into latent explan-ations, so that when enough of them have been found and co-llected together, then such ‘evidence-based’ explanations cansimply become manifest by themselves, irrespective of the predi-lection of the humble historian who, professionally, then ‘bowsdown before their weight’ (extraordinary metaphors these butunderstandable in terms of the notion of the sovereignty of thepast which one has a duty to serve, etc.). Carr, on the other hand,much more ‘bolshy’, realises that it is the active historian whodoes all the work of organising the past’s traces (and who thusdeserves all the credit), and that the kinds of explanations thetraces can be found to support depend upon the type of organ-isation being practised. In Carr’s argument, therefore, the traceonly becomes evidence when it is used to support an argument(interpretation) prior to which, although it exists, it remains justan unused piece of stuff from the past. This seems perfectlyacceptable to me and clarifies the position muddied by Elton’sterminology. However, one of the reasons why the Carr positionhasn’t been seen to be conclusive within the parameters of ‘thedebate’ (and thus partly why the debate has been perpetuated) isnot least because Carr himself sometimes used the word ‘evi-dence’ in places where he should have retained the term ‘source’(trace), thus finding himself in the paradoxical position ofapparently arguing that the evidence is both there before it isused but that it only really becomes evidence when it has beenused. The way out of this Carr-Elton debate is therefore to be

on some questions and some answers 59

consistent and not use the term ‘evidence’ ambiguously. Bywhich I mean we simply remember the salient points: (a) thepast occurred; (b) traces of it remain; (c) these traces are therewhether the historian goes to them and finds them or not;(d) evidence is the term used when (some or other) of thesetraces are used ‘in evidence’ on behalf of (some or other)argument (interpretation) and not before. Evidence, therefore,as opposed to traces, is always the product of the historian’sdiscourse simply because, prior to that discourse being articu-lated, evidence (history) doesn’t exist: only traces do (only thepast did).

At this point we can move to the second way of resolving theevidence problem; or rather we can, by recasting the pointsmade in the last paragraph and by again working the past-historydistinction, underline the Carr-like argument that the past’s holdon history is really the historian’s hold on history; that the past,itself, in some sort of pre-discursive way, quite literally ‘doesn’thave a say in it’.

The argument here – one that when developed pushes theCarr-Elton debate on to more rigorous grounds – is that contraryto what Elton is effectively claiming, the evidence of the past perse cannot act logically as a check on the historian’s free playbecause, constituted by discourse, as an effect of discourse, itcannot be made to function as a cause of discourse or as a pre-discursive check (on itself). This (perhaps difficult) point hasbeen explained by Roland Barthes in The Discourse of History wherehe attacks those historians – in our context Elton – who want todeliver ‘true’ accounts as guaranteed by the ‘raw evidence’ of the‘real’ (the real past). Barthes argues that such historians performa sleight of hand whereby the referent (the ‘thing’ the historianrefers to) is projected into a realm supposedly beyond discoursefrom which position it can then be thought of as preceding anddetermining the discourse which in fact posited it as referent inthe first place. According to Barthes this paradox governs the

on some questions and some answers60

distinctiveness of historical discourse: ‘the fact [the evidence]can only have a linguistic existence, as a term in a discourse, andyet it is exactly as if this existence were merely the “copy” . . . ofanother existence situated in the . . . domain of the “real”. Thistype of discourse is . . . [one] in which the referent is aimed foras something external to the discourse without it ever beingpossible to attain it outside this discourse.’17 We can leave itthere.

ON COUPLETS: ON CAUSATION, ETC.

The couplets to be referred to here are cause and effect, continu-ity and change, and similarity and difference. What I intend todo is problematicise them, not in the sense that they aregenerally taken unproblematically as ‘heartland’ concepts – anargument I have already rebutted – but to question further thecommon assumption that these concepts actually can be usedunproblematically; that is, that it is almost routinely easy toascertain, say, the causes and consequences of an event. In factthis is not the case. Although these couplets are said to be theones historians use all the time, it is extremely doubtful if theysucceed in using them very rigorously. Accordingly I will exam-ine just one of the concepts, causality, and raise some questionsabout it that might then be applied to the others.

Let me start to raise these questions by way of posing some.When you are told that history is partly about the way thathistorians find the causes of past events, with which theories ofcausal explanation are you presented? Marxist, structuralist,phenomenological, hermeneutic? Anything? When you com-bine causal factors in terms of the various weight they may haveexerted on some event, when the question of their relative influ-ence vis-à-vis each other is raised, how do you do the discriminat-ing? If you were asked now to explain the causes of the FrenchRevolution of 1789, what would you do?

on some questions and some answers 61

Consider this question then: ‘how far back and how far afieldwould it be necessary to go to give a satisfactory analysis of thenecessary and sufficient causes of 1789?’

How do you answer this? Does Marxism tell you? Doesstructural-functionalism? Does an Annales approach?

If one of these does; if, say, Marxism lays down a method ofproceeding (crudely, economic conditions must be consideredas basic determinants of superstructural changes within thethesis of class struggle; crudely, by involving methodologicalabstractions, etc.), then how do you work this in detail? Forexample, how far back do you (have to?) take the influence ofeconomics (to 1783, 1760, 1714, 1648?) and what, exactly, doyou include in this category of the economic? How, within theeconomic, do you know when aspects of it play a decisive roleand then lie relatively dormant, determining ‘in the lastinstance’? Again, how far afield will you go: is France meta-phorically an island or inextricably caught up within a generalEuropean trajectory? What counts as Europe in the eighteenthcentury? Does America? Again, how do you measure the variouslevels and degrees of interpenetration between, say, the eco-nomic, the political, the social, the cultural, the ideological; andwhat goes into these categories? Again, how far would youranalysis depend upon everyday contingencies: the types ofmaterial available, the times of access to it; on the time you havebeen given and give yourself to answer the question, etc.? Again,what sort of philosophical minefields and stipulated definitionslurk in the terms satisfactory, necessary, sufficient and analysis?And so on . . . I mean, how do you begin to tackle all the causalfactors and complexity of analysis suggested by just these fewobvious questions? Where do such questions end?

At this point you may say well, actually, we do not have ques-tions set like that one. They are more straightforward, thus ‘Whydid the French Revolution occur in 1789?’ Although this may behow questions on 1789 typically read, behind them lies the sorts

on some questions and some answers62

of questions I have raised; namely, the question of ‘Why 1789?’means ‘What are the causes of 1789?’ such causes apparentlybeing an infinite chain spreading backwards and outwardswhich you somehow have to cut into despite the fact that nomethod (and no amount of experience) can provide you withany logical or definitive cut in (or ‘cut out’) points in order togive a sufficient and necessary explanation.

The problem will not go away; so how do you do it? I thinkthat the answer that actually operates in the main is that youcopy other people. That is, you know you have something like asatisfactory answer to the question of 1789 because your answerlooks and reads like other people’s operating in the same dis-course – give or take the odd lapse or innovation. Learning his-tory is very much about learning how to play the game in thesame way as those already in the game (in the trade) do. In thatsense learning history is like practising a craft, like serving anapprenticeship, so that you know you have a satisfactory analysisbecause it has been constructed from, say, published secondarytexts (books, articles, essays) by master-craftsmen who are alsotrying to explain 1789 – texts by Hobsbawm, Hampson,Schama. Doing history in the main is therefore not all that rigor-ous theoretically with regard to even some of its most centralpreoccupations such as trying to explain why things happened,and few A level or undergraduate courses consider systematicallyand in depth the methodological problems lying in ambush forthose who would actually like to know what they are doing.Naturally, all courses could do and they all ought to, andthroughout I have footnoted various texts which exploremethod. Having said that, we can remind ourselves that weshould not be surprised at this lacuna in ‘training’. For as Imentioned in chapter 1, the dominant discourse is not too inter-ested in the explicit probe for methodological clarity, for thatcan be picked up (for goodness’ sake!) by practising ‘properhistory’ (that is, so the mythology goes, that in the practice of

on some questions and some answers 63

seeking to explain what happened in the past by providing aprecise reconstruction of events reported in primary sources andcontextualised in certain secondary ones, and by suppressing asmuch as possible the impulse to interpret or by indicating in thenarrative when the facts are merely being represented and whenthey are being interpreted, so one naturally learns what to do).18

No, what the dominant discourse is interested in (though hereagain not always consciously) is arguably the transmission of acertain type of historical culture (which it considers as the histor-ical culture) so that what is crucial is that, within the academicarticulation of that preference, you begin to copy such academ-ics effectively. At these levels of history you are being inductedinto a specific type of academic discourse where it is your abilityto internalise it and then write it down (to pass on; to pass the‘tests’) that is crucial. Here is Terry Eagleton writing about whatthe academic study of literature is predominantly about (for‘literature’ read ‘history’):

Becoming certified by the state in literary studies [A level,degrees, etc.] is a matter of being able to talk and write incertain ways. It is this which is being taught, examined andcertificated. . . . Nobody is especially concerned about what yousay . . . provided [it is] compatible with, and can be articulatedwithin, a specific form of discourse. . . . Those employed toteach you this form of discourse will remember whether or notyou were able to speak it long after they have forgotten whatyou said.

Literary theorists, critics and teachers, then, are . . . cus-todians of discourse. Their task is to preserve this discourse,extend it and elaborate it as necessary . . . initiate newcomersinto it and determine whether or not they have successfullymastered it.19

on some questions and some answers64

HISTORY: A SCIENCE OR AN ART?

The debate over whether history is a science or an art, still avibrant topic in ‘the nature of history’ debates, is a product ofnineteenth-century ideology.20 In the nineteenth century theview was widely held that science was the route to truth, andthis idea went across the board from Ranke to Comte to Marx.But none pressed the case so hard for history’s scientificity asMarx. Accordingly, from the moment when Marxist socialismstarted to refer to itself (and be referred to) as ‘scientific social-ism’, so bourgeois theorists were concerned to undercut thesciences as such in order to catch in their nets the scientific/certaintist pretensions of the left, and they have done so withsome success, but only at the expense of undercutting anyscientific foundations they might want or need themselves.

Consequently, and drawing heavily on the romantic artists’antipathy towards science, history was to be considered increas-ingly as ‘an art’.21 Yet, when pressed to go the whole hog andexpress itself as just another narrative discourse admitting toorganising the past through various rhetorical devices, tropes,emplotments and so forth, historians resisted, falling back on theview that history was, after all, a semi-science, in that historian’sdata did not lend itself to free artistic licence, and that the formand content of their narratives was not a matter of choice butrequired ‘by the nature of the historical materials themselves’. Inthis way science, noisily kicked out of the front door, was half-heartedly re-admitted through the back, the result being that theoscillation between ‘science and art’ has remained as part of theinternal problematic of mainstream history.

In this regard history is somewhat isolated, in that theorists inneighbouring discourses do not concur with the ‘conventional’historians’ assumption that art and science are very differentways of reading the world, having long seen through the ideo-logical locus of the dichotomy that historians have in general

on some questions and some answers 65

mis-recognised and which they have thus retained as beingreally a problem of epistemology and method. The reason forthis continuation of the debate is therefore due not least to thatantipathy towards theory which I noted in the Introduction as acharacteristic afflicting historians, an affliction underlined by theobservation of Hayden White that, since the middle of the nine-teenth century, most historians have affected a kind of wilfulmethodological naïveté:

as history has become increasingly professionalised and spe-cialised, the ordinary historian, wrapped up in the search forthe elusive document that will establish him as an authority in anarrowly defined field, has had little time to inform himself ofthe latest developments in the more remote fields of art andscience. Many historians are not aware, therefore, that the rad-ical disjunction between art and science which their self-arrogated roles as mediators between them presupposes mayperhaps be no longer justified.22

In effect then, in the epistemological and methodologicalterms in which the ‘art-science’ debate is conducted, that debateis passè. It can be read, however, as retaining its present vitalitythrough ideological pressures still expressed as ‘method’ notleast because of historians’ relatively cavalier attitude towardstheory and introspection.

CONCLUSION

Looking back over this chapter it seems that the questions I havebeen considering as constituting some of the main areas ofintroductory debate with regard to the nature of history, haveclustered around the ramifications of the problematic of truth. Ithink this is so because practically all the debates generated byand around the ‘history question’ do in fact have their locus

on some questions and some answers66

there. Debates over whether the historian’s knowledge can begained objectively and through the ‘proper practices’, orwhether it is intersubjective and interpretive; debates overwhether history is value-free or always positioned ‘for some-one’; debates over whether history is innocent or ideological,unbiased or biased, fact or fancy. Or, again, debates aboutwhether empathy can provide us with real understandings ofpeople who lived in the past; debates about whether we can, bygoing to the original sources (traces) know genuinely and indepth; debates as to whether those conceptual couplets representthe essence of history, and finally debates as to whether the realsecrets of the past will be revealed through the rigours of scien-tific method or the flair of the artist.

My answers to these questions have been on the side of scepti-cism. Of course, this follows from my treatment of what I thinkhistory is as outlined in chapter 1. There, having made the pointthat the past and history are in different categories (and thusconstitute an ontological gap) I indicated some of the epistemo-logical, methodological, ideological and practical reasons thatmake the transformation of the past into history problematic.Thus in coming to a series of conclusions that very much quer-ied the extent to which the past can be known, then, to beconsistent, I was bound to come down against any kind of cer-taintist knowledge. Thus, vis-à-vis the debates, I have had to arguethat the truth(s) of the past elude us; that history is intersub-jective and ideologically positioned; that objectivity and beingunbiased are chimeras; that empathy is flawed; that ‘originals’ donot entail anything ‘genuine’; that history is, in opposition to itbeing an art or a science, something else – something sui generis, aworldly, wordy language game played for real, and where themetaphors of history as science or history as art, reflect thedistribution of power that put these metaphors into play.

It may be, of course, that this kind of scepticism towardshistorical knowledge may lead towards cynicism and varieties of

on some questions and some answers 67

negativity. But it need not and it does not for me. Along withand for the same sort of reasons as Hayden White, I see moralrelativism and epistemological scepticism as the basis for socialtoleration and the positive recognition of differences.23 As Whitehas put it:

We do not expect that Constable and Cézanne will have lookedfor the same thing in a given landscape, and when we confronttheir respective representations of a landscape, we do notexpect to have to choose between them and determine which isthe ‘more correct’ one . . . when we view the work of an artist or. . . a scientist [or historian] we do not ask if he sees what wewould see in the same general field, but whether or not he hasintroduced into his representation of it anything that could beconsidered false information for anyone who is capable of under-standing the system of notation used.

If applied to historical writing, the methodological and styl-istic cosmopolitanism which this conception . . . promoteswould force historians to abandon the attempt to portray ‘oneparticular portion of life right side up and in true perspective’ . . .and to recognise that there is no such thing as a single correctview. . . . This would allow us to entertain seriously those cre-ative distortions offered by minds capable of looking at the pastwith the same seriousness as ourselves but with different . . .orientations. Then we should no longer naïvely expect thatstatements about a given epoch or complex of events in thepast ‘correspond’ to some pre-existent body of ‘raw facts’. Forwe should recognise that what constitutes the facts themselves isthe problem that the historian . . . has tried to solve in thechoice of the metaphor by which he orders his world, past,present and future.24

It is this kind of approach that I have been concerned to arguefor here; a positive reflexive scepticism. This is an attitude that

on some questions and some answers68

considers knowledge to be a good thing, and that knowledgedoes not become bad when the sceptical knowledge we nowhave as a culture, shows us the limits of the certaintist knowledgewe once, as a culture, thought we had. Again, by linking historyto the powers that constitute it, history may lose its innocence;but if that innocence (of history ‘for its own sake’) has been theway the dominant discourse has articulated its interests, then in ademocratic society this is something we ought to know. In anycase, the aim here has been to help you to be reflexive; todevelop a self-conscious reflexivity not only of the questions oneasks and the answers one accepts, but why one asks and answersin the way one does and not other; further, of what suchprocesses signify in terms of one’s position. Such reflexivityponders over how the discourse one is studying – history – hasbeen written by forces and pressures way beyond its ostensibleobject of enquiry – the past – forces and pressures that I thinkcan best be understood today by the practices and ideas ofpost-modernism.

on some questions and some answers 69

3DOING HISTORY IN THE POST-

MODERN WORLD

At various times throughout this text, and not least in theclosing words of the last chapter, I have asserted and/or takenit as read that we live in a post-modern world and that thiscondition affects the sorts of views you and I might holdabout history. What I want to do now is to substantiate thisassertion and to say a little more about what such views mayentail. To do this I have divided this chapter into three sec-tions. First I want to work an already existing definition ofpost-modernism and look briefly at how the condition it refersto seems to have come into existence. Secondly I will showhow this type of post-modernism has produced a situationwhere there has now developed a mass of historical genres andwhat some of the implications of this are for history’s natureand for historical work. Thirdly I will sketch in an argumentabout what history perhaps ought to be that does not seek todeny post-modernist consequences but which rather suggests away of running positively with them; a way of doing history

in the post-modern world that again throws light on ‘the historyquestion’.

Post-modernism is a difficult area. Because post-modernists seenothing as fixed or solid this jeopardises the sorts of attemptsthat they may make to define what they see themselves as part of,whilst some commentators have doubted (self-described post-modernists notwithstanding) the very existence of the condi-tion.1 I have found increasingly that the definition offered by theFrench philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in The Post-Modern Condi-tion is one that I can make sense of and use.2 It is inevitable thatLyotard should have his detractors and my use of his ideas heredoes not mean I have simply ignored various critiques. Neverthe-less, Lyotard’s analysis about that part of the world in which Ilive – a social formation where under the impact of secularising,democratising, computerising and consumerising pressures themaps and statuses of knowledge are being redrawn and re-described – is one that I seem to recognise. Lyotard’s definitionoffers a vantage point and a range of concepts from and throughwhich it appears possible to see what is currently going on bothin general terms and in just one of the areas being affected,namely history.

Lyotard’s definition at its most basic is rather minimal, charac-terising post-modernism as witnessing the ‘death of centres’ andof displaying ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. What dothese things mean and how can they be explained?

They mean, first of all, that all those old organising frame-works that presupposed the privileging of various centres(things that are, for example, Anglo-centric, Euro-centric,ethno-centric, gender-centric, logo-centric) are no longerregarded as legitimate and natural frameworks (legitimatebecause natural), but as temporary fictions which were usefulfor the articulation not of universal but of actually very particularinterests; whilst ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ means that

doing history in the post-modern world 71

those great structuring (metaphysical) stories which have givenmeaning(s) to western developments have been drained of vital-ity. After the nineteenth-century announcements of the death ofGod (the theological metanarrative), the death of secular surro-gates has occurred. The late nineteenth and the twentieth centur-ies have seen an undercutting of reason and science which hasmade problematic all those certaintist discourses built uponthem: that whole Enlightenment project; those various pro-grammes of human progress, reform and emancipation thatmanifested themselves in, say, humanism, liberalism, Marxism,and so on.

Why have such endings occurred? Why this now ‘commonsense’ (of) incredulity? Let me, whilst being conscious of theconstructed nature of all historical narratives, offer a briefexplanatory story.3

Long ago, pre-modern social hierarchies were based over-whelmingly on what were taken to be intrinsic values: divinity,race, blood, lineage. Here what determined a man’s position waswhat he was by birth, by what he had in him, so that a man justwas ‘born to rule’, a man just was ‘born to serve’, a man just didknow and have ‘his place’. But it was precisely these naturalorders, once the legitimisation of kings, aristocracies and priests,that were undercut by the commercial, financial and industrialbourgeoisie. Busy manufacturing all kinds of things, the bour-geoisie began to manufacture itself, coming to express its ambi-tions through the idea of liberal utility. According to this theory,men were now to be seen to have value not by virtue of birth butby effort; what value a person was to have in life was to beearned not given. Hence the hard-working bourgeoisie soonlocated its own value in those external objects that expressed andembodied its toil – private property. From this position thebourgeoisie was then able to run two critiques that tried toestablish its differences from and importance over everyone else;that is, from those people whose wealth and property were

doing history in the post-modern world72

considered unearned (the idle rich) and those who had little orno property to speak of (the relatively idle poor).

However, this late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centurylegitimation was not to last. In developing the capitalist mode ofproduction the bourgeoisie developed other things too: aromantic, aristocratic reaction that arguably soured into an élitistennui to resurface in unpleasant ways in aspects of the twentiethcentury,4 whilst wage labourers, workers who certainly recog-nised that they were poor alright but not that they were idle,preferred to be seen exactly as they were coming to bedescribed, as the working classes. Consequently it was not longbefore such workers began to press the same concept of utilitythat the bourgeoisie had used against the old regime, against abourgeoisie which was, from the workers’ perspective, itselfrelatively unproductive. In this way the idea of utility provided asort of ‘rough guide to exploitation’, and to it Marx in particularconstructed for the working classes (the proletariat) a muchmore elaborate philosophical and historical understanding oftheir position. This was to produce an ideology which did notvalue the gaining of some sort of property by the proletariat sothat through it they could then enjoy the same formal rights andfreedoms as the bourgeoisie (the enticing bourgeois carrot ofrespectability); but rather the argument was that the route tosubstantive freedom was to be via the abolition of property.Given that the proletariat effectively had no property, then whatbetter could they value than the one thing that they did own –themselves. Men, it was argued, had value just by being alive. Ifliving a life was to all intents and purposes prevented by the typeof property distribution that existed as capitalism, then suchproperty could go. In the (not so distant) future lay the prospectof a world held in authentic human freedom and in common –communism.

In the USSR in 1917 the communist experiment began. Fromthe start its global ambitions (‘workers of the world unite’)

doing history in the post-modern world 73

received set-backs. The universalism of Marxism became local-ised quickly into national expressions, and its emancipatory endsoon became embroiled within the contingencies of dictatorialmeans. In this way actually existing socialism unintentionallyhelped to deconstruct its own potential, turning increasinglypessimistic what was once the workers’ supremely optimisticmetanarrative, Marxism.

Meanwhile, back in the west, two European-based worldwars, economic crises, Fascism, Nazism, and the guilt-riddentraumas of de-colonisation, along with further critiques ofcapitalism by ‘western Marxists’ (among others Gramsci, theFrankfurt School, Althusser) and more recently, feminists, hadfinally broken down the last remaining theories underpinningnotions of liberal progress, of harmony through competition, ofan optimistic belief in the reasonableness of (bourgeois) rationalman. In this situation capitalism thus had to find itself anotherbasis for value, and this time it located it in an overt celebrationof what had actually always underpinned it but which it hadlong considered as too risky to expose without some kind ofprotective human (organicist, humanist, welfarist) face, marketforces as such, a theoretical visibility (in monetarism, etc.) thatwent hand in hand with the extraordinary economic productiv-ity of the post-1950 era.

But, of course, as suspected, such an explicit valorisation ofthe ‘cash-nexus’, such a heavy prioritisation of consumerchoice, could only be bought at the expense of foregroundingrelativism and pragmatism. In the open market commoditieshave no pretence of possessing intrinsic value; the value of‘goods’ lies in what they can be exchanged for, in theirexchange-value. In such a market, people too take on the garbof objects, finding their value in external relationships. Simi-larly, private and public moralities are affected; ethics becomepersonalised and narcissistic, a relative and free-wheeling affairof taste and style: ‘You can be anything you like man!’ No

doing history in the post-modern world74

moral absolutes transcend the everyday. Such relativism andscepticism affect the status of epistemological and method-ological practices too; here there are only positions, perspec-tives, models, angles, paradigms. The objects of knowledgeseem to be constructed arbitrarily, thrown together in themanner of collage, montage and pastiche, so that, as Lyotard hasexpressed it, ‘Modernity seems to be . . . a way of shaping asequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rateof contingency.’5 Here a flexible pragmatism runs (what isgood is what pays off) resulting in a series of calculating prac-tices. Accordingly, in a culture as informed by relativism as this,any remaining version of left-wing emancipation – already viti-ated by those actual left regimes – has become confused, notleast because of the virtual disappearance of the left’s (object-ive) object of enquiry/commitment, the proletariat. Due to therestructuring of older industrial practices in the face of newerentrepreneurial/service ones, then the proletariat, like theheavy industry it owed its composition to, has effectively beendecomposed. In its place there is now a series of differences: asmall working-class core, a new(ish) underclass, and the ratherunstable groupings of (some) youth, the unemployed, blacks,women, gays, Greens.

To bring this story towards a close: in these arguably postistdays – post-liberal, post-western, post-heavy industrial, post-Marxist – the old centres barely hold, and the old metanarrativesno longer resonate with actuality and promise, coming to lookincredible from late twentieth-century sceptical perspectives.(‘Fancy anybody ever believing in that!’) Possibly no social for-mation we know of has so systematically eradicated intrinsicvalue from its culture so much as liberal market capitalism, notthrough choice, but through the ‘cultural logic of late-capital’.6

Accordingly, as George Steiner has noted, ‘it is this collapse, moreor less complete, more or less conscious, of those hierarchial,definitional value gradients (and can there be value without

doing history in the post-modern world 75

hierarchy?) which is now the major fact of our intellectual andsocial circumstances.’7

Post-modernism is the general expression of those circum-stances. Post-modernism is not a united movement. It is not atendency which essentially belongs to either the left of thecentre or the right (at some point on a spectrum) and nor is it aconsequence of post-1968 intellectual/Parisian blues.8 Rather, ascircumstances have demanded, aristocratic, bourgeois and leftideologues (from Nietzsche to Freud to Saussure to Wittgensteinto Althusser to Foucault to Derrida) have had to reappraise,across a range of discourses (philosophy, linguistics, politics, art,literature, history), the bases for their positions as they haveadjusted to the wider socio-economic, political and culturalslippages underfoot. These reappraisals, although conductedvery differently and for oppositional reasons, have all reachedthe same conclusion. As they have searched ever harder for somefoundations for their own positions, what they have all realisedis that no such foundations exist either for themselves or foranybody else – and nor have they ever done so: every idol hashad feet made of clay. As a result scepticism or, more strongly,nihilism, just do now provide the dominant, underlyingintellectual presuppositions of ‘our times’.9

Of course types and degrees of scepticism have long livedwithin the ‘Western Tradition’ (as was mentioned in chapter 2),but the difference this time is that what had previously beenglimpsed somewhat intermittently and kept largely on themargins, not only now lies right across our culture, but is alsovariously welcomed. For post-modernists not only refuse tomourn or wax nostalgic for those now ghostly centres andmetanarratives (nor for those who mostly benefited from them)but, for a range of reasons, celebrate or strategically utilise thewidely acknowledged ‘incommensurability of reality toconcepts’.10

doing history in the post-modern world76

This then is what I take to be our post-modern world. This is thepressure that has allowed, or forced, the perspective on historythat I have sketched out in chapters 1 and 2. And it is this samepressure – this overbearing circumstance – which has also pro-duced what I now want to go on to consider; the consequentialexistence of that whole mass of history genres which currentlysurround us and which have helped relativise and historicisehistory at the very same time as history began to be widelyexpressed through these ‘sceptical’ characteristics. This is a post-modern milieu where the concept of ‘ironic re-description’, asconstrued by Richard Rorty, appropriately describes our timesand its various workings of the (its) past, and can serve to intro-duce those genres.

In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,11 Rorty has sketched in a figurethat he has called the liberal ironist (actually himself). This per-son is liberal because s/he thinks that acts of cruelty are theworst things that people can do to each other, but s/he is alsosufficiently historicist and nominalist enough (‘things’ are‘words’) to have abandoned the idea that such beliefs refer backto some kind of real foundation beyond the reach of time andchance. For the liberal ironist there is no way of demonstratingto someone who wishes to be cruel that it is wrong to be so.What has thus been seen from the end of the eighteenth centuryuntil it now lives generally in our culture, says Rorty, is the viewthat anything can be made to look good or bad, desirable orundesirable, useful or useless, simply by being re-described (justas in my story what counted as value for the aristocrat, bourgeoisand proletarian was re-described). And it is this ‘re-descriptiveturn’ that has encompassed, of course, the particular thing thatwe are interested in in this text, the past/history.

For as we have seen, this is a past that can be infinitely rede-scribed. It can and has supported countless plausible and, vis-à-vistheir own methodological lights, equally legitimate histo-ries; it has unfailingly given whatever historians (and their

doing history in the post-modern world 77

impersonators) have wanted and want: various births, origins,legitimating antecedents, explanations and lines of descent(Tory, Whig, Marxist etc.) useful for them as they try to be incontrol, so that they can make the past their past and so say,along with Nietzsche, ‘So I willed it.’

Today more people(s) than ever before are willing things. Inthe wake of those absent centres and collapsed metanarratives, sothe conditions of post-modernism have produced that multi-plicity of histories that can be met everywhere throughout ourdemocratic/consumerising culture, a mass of genres (designer/niche histories) to be variously used and/or abused.

Here we can identify, say, historians’ histories (professionalhistories attempting to exercise hegemony over the field, a ver-sion expressed in the thesis, the monograph and the text),teachers’ histories (necessarily popularisations of professionalhistories), and then a whole range of other distinctive formsthat can only be listed: children’s histories, popular-memoryhistories, proscribed histories, black histories, white histories,women’s histories, feminist histories, men’s histories, heritagehistories, reactionary histories, revolutionary histories, bottom-dog histories, top-dog histories, etc., all these varying constructsbeing affected by local, regional, national and internationalperspectives.

This is not all. All of these genres have ragged and interlap-ping edges, all lean on each other and define themselves by whatthey are not – inter-textuality. Not only that. All are strafed byepistemological, methodological and ideological assumptionsthat show no one-to-one relationship but which move across thewhole field so that we can look at each of these genres nowstructurally or phenomenologically and then empirically orexistentially; from the perspective now of liberalism or Marxismand then from the radical right, combining and re-combiningthe available elements so that none of the resultant histories hasany necessary permanence; is expressive of no essence. What is

doing history in the post-modern world78

clear is therefore the utter contingency of readings and therecognition that interpretations at (say) the ‘centre’ of our cul-ture are not there because they are true or methodologicallycorrect (brilliant histories can be marginalised if their subjectmatter is unpalatable) but because they are aligned to the dom-inant discursive practices: again power/knowledge.

This interpretive flux, when viewed positively, is potentiallyempowering to even the most marginal in that they can at leastmake their own histories even if they do not have the power tomake them other peoples’. As Peter Widdowson has argued, it isunlikely that history can now be rescued from a historiographi-cally led and methodologically informed deconstructionism,‘and nor should it be’.12 Querying the notion of the historian’struth, pointing to the variable facticity of facts, insisting thathistorians write the past from ideological positions, stressingthat history is a written discourse as liable to deconstruction asany other, arguing that ‘the past’ is as notional a concept as ‘thereal world’ to which novelists allude in realist fiction – only everexisting in the present discourses that articulate it – all thesethings destabilise the past and fracture it, so that, in the cracksopened up, new histories can be made.

On the other hand, however, viewed negatively by those whoretain enough power to draw up the boundaries of an osten-sibly ‘proper’ history still stubbornly defined by reference to aputative objectivity, then this freedom to make alternative read-ings seems subversive; it appears challenging. Accordingly it hasgenerally been the case that the dominant discursive practicesattempt to close down (effect a closure) on those readings theywish not to run. At our present conjuncture, two such approachesto closure can be seen. Either the dominant practices attempt torecuperate/incorporate unwelcome histories into the main-stream (as in attempts to ‘redomesticate’ feminist readings byallowing them a proper and respectable place within history perse rather than letting them remain her-story); or, ironically, they

doing history in the post-modern world 79

capitalise on the phenomenon of post-modern pastlessness,turning it (re-describing it) to their advantage.

If the past can be read as an endless circulation of insubstantialinterests and styles, then this applies not only to the more dom-inant readings but to newer alternative ones too. For while theremay be a sense in which everyone is in the same boat, becausenot all the boat’s occupants are in the same position, in thatsome already have their histories in place, this problematicisa-tion of the foundations for historical building is held to be moredamaging for those whose constructions are at an early stage.Widdowson again: ‘In this scenario, post modernism is the lastgreat gambit of capitalism to [try and] defeat opposition, con-testation and change . . . “We are left in a world of radically‘empty’ signifiers. No meaning. No classes. No history. Just aceaseless procession of simulacra; the past is played and replayedas an amusing range of styles, genres, signifying practices to becombined and re-combined at will. . . . The only history thatexists here is the history of the signifier and that is no history atall. . . .” ’13

My own view on these ‘possibilities’ that post-modernism hasconstituted at the very same time as allowing expression, is thatsuch attempts at status quo recuperation and closure are unlikely tobe effective within the trajectory of democratising, sceptical/ironic social formations and that, après Widdowson, they oughtnot to be anyway. Between the Scylla and Charybdis of, on theone hand, authorised history and, on the other, post-modernpastlessness, a space exists for the desirable outcome of as manypeople(s) as possible to make their own histories such that theycan have real effects (a real say) in the world. To be sure, in theirdirection and in their impact these effects cannot be guaranteedwith precision or (much to the chagrin of, say, Marxist under-writers) definitively underwritten.14 But they can occur and onecan help them. For viewed not in its traditional guise as a subjectdiscipline aiming at a real knowledge of the past, but seen rather

doing history in the post-modern world80

as what it is, a discursive practice that enables present-mindedpeople(s) to go to the past, there to delve around and reorganiseit appropriately to their needs, then such history, as the culturalcritic Tony Bennett has argued, may well have a radical cogencythat can make visible aspects of the past that have previouslybeen hidden or secreted away; that have previously beenoverlooked or sidelined, thereby producing fresh insightsthat can actually make emancipatory, material differences to andwithin the present – which is where all history starts fromand returns to.

I now come to the third and final section of this chapter. Here Iwant to suggest a way in which it might be possible to run‘historically’ with the consequences of post-modernism as out-lined above in the positive direction of democratic emancipa-tion; a democratic emancipation that at one and the same timefurther clarifies the question of ‘the nature of history’.

In The Discourse of History, Roland Barthes has argued that thepast can be represented in many historians’ modes and tropessome of which, however, are less mythological and mystifyingthan others inasmuch as they deliberately call overt attention totheir own processes of production and explicitly indicate theconstructed rather than the found nature of their referents. As faras I am concerned the benefits of this are obvious. To work inthis way is to adopt a method which deconstructs and histori-cises all those interpretations that have certaintist pretensionsand which fail to call into question the conditions of their ownmaking; which forget to indicate their subservience tounrevealed interests, which mis-recognise their own historicalmoment, and which mask those epistemological, method-ological and ideological pre-suppositions that, as I have tried tosuggest throughout this text, everywhere and everytime mediatethe past into history.

How might this desirable approach to history then – an

doing history in the post-modern world 81

approach designed to develop a democratising critical intelli-gence laced with irony – be realised? Perhaps two things areneeded. First would be what might be termed a reflexive meth-odology. What this means is that (perhaps as students) you aregiven an explicit analysis of why the history you are getting isthe one you are getting and why you are getting it in the wayyou are and not in any other. This analysis would work the fertiledistinction between the past and history out of which emergesthe problematics of ‘the history question’ that I have begun tointroduce and look at in this text. And further, there is then aneed for detailed historiographical studies to examine how pre-vious and current histories have been constructed both in termsof their method and their content; and here a further text isneeded. What I am suggesting is thus a radical historicisation ofhistory (‘always historicise’) and I take this as the starting pointfor a reflexive historian, going on to suggest that, for subsequenthistorical work, you develop a self-consciously held (andacknowledged) position.

Here a comment about a ‘choice of position’ is necessary.For in saying that you ought to make an explicit choice of

position I do not want to imply that if you do not want to makesuch a choice then you can do a ‘position-less’ history. That is, Ido not want to suggest that you have some sort of freedom tochoose or not; for this is to be unreflectively liberal. In liberaldiscourse there is always posited, somewhere and somehow, asort of neutral ground from which it looks precisely as if you canchoose or not. This neutral ground is not seen as another pos-ition one already occupies, but is considered rather as a disinter-ested site from which one can sit back and objectively makeunbiased choices and judgements. But we have seen that this isnot so. There is no such thing as an ‘unpositioned centre’ (actu-ally a contradiction in terms); no possibility of an unpositionedsite. The only choice is between a history that is aware of what itis doing and a history that is not. Here the comments of the

doing history in the post-modern world82

literary theorist Robert Young are to the point (for his ‘criticism’read ‘reading’):

No criticism is without an implicit – if not explicit – theoreticalposition. Thus the complaint levelled against so-called ‘theor-etical criticism’ – that it imposes its theories on to the texts [thepast] themselves – is in fact most applicable to so-called ‘non-theoretical criticism’, whose pre-conceptions about how toread and what to read for, are so fundamental that they remain‘natural’ . . . free of theory.15

Thus, all history is theoretical and all theories are positionedand positioning. In choosing a position of your own I wouldthus obviously not want to impose my way of reading the paston you, but I would ask you to remember that as you chooseyou always select a version of the past and a way of appropriatingit that has effects; that aligns you with some readings (readers)and against others.16 The point is this: that those who claim toknow what history is, is for them (as for me) to have alwaysalready carried out an act of interpretation.17

And finally, the second thing to help realise a sceptical, critic-ally reflexive approach to both the ‘history question’ and doinghistory, is the selection of a content appropriate for this practice.Of course, there is a sense in which any part of the past wouldsuffice for this, given its readiness to oblige any interpreter.Nevertheless, other things being equal, my own preferencewould be for a series of histories that helped us to understandthe world that we live in and the forms of history that have bothhelped produce it and which it has produced. This is an ordinaryenough claim but it can be critically twisted somewhat by usinga form of words by Foucault: not so much a history to help usunderstand the world in which we live then, but rather a seriesof ‘histories of the present’.

The reason for this choice can be put briefly. If the present can

doing history in the post-modern world 83

best be understood as post-modern (and if, as Philip Rieff hasremarked, we can actually survive this experiment called mod-ernity18) then this suggests to me that the content of a preferredhistory should be studies of this phenomenon. That is, that theanalyses of our modern world via the methodologicallyinformed perspectives of post-modernism not only help us tolocate all those present debates over ‘what is history?’ (who ishistory for?), but also provide us, at a moment in time thathinges between the old and the new, with what in a sense allthese debates want: a context that will make an informed andworkable answer to that question possible. In the post-modernworld, then, arguably the content and context of history shouldbe a generous series of methodologically reflexive studies of themakings of the histories of post-modernity itself.

doing history in the post-modern world84

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 I use the term discourse throughout this book (e.g. ‘to be in control ofyour own discourse’; ‘the discourse of history’) in the sense that itrelates people’s thoughts about history to interests and power. Thus,to be in control of your own discourse means that you have powerover what you want history to be rather than accepting what others sayit is; this consequently empowers you, not them. Similarly, the use ofthe phrase ‘the discourse of history’, means that, rather than seeinghistory as a subject or a discipline (schoolish terms) which suggeststhat you just learn something that is always already there in somenatural or obvious way and to which you innocently, objectively anddisinterestedly respond, you actually see history as a ‘field of force’; aseries of ways of organising the past by and for interested partieswhich always comes from somewhere and for some purpose andwhich, in their direction, would like to carry you with them. This field isa ‘field of force’ because in it these directions are contested (have tobe fought for). It is a field that variously includes and excludes, whichcentres and marginalises views of the past in ways and in degrees thatrefract the powers of those forwarding them. Using the term ‘dis-course’, then, indicates that we know that history is never itself, is

never said or read (articulated, expressed, discoursed) innocently, butthat it is always for someone. This text works on the assumption thatknowing this might empower the knower, and that this is a goodthing. (Note: This way of using the terms is not the same as thatdiscussed by Hayden White in his introduction to Tropics of Discourse,London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; see especially White’stechnical – and brilliant – Introduction.)

2 E. H. Carr, What Is History?, London, Penguin, 1963; G. Elton, ThePractice of History, London, Fontana, 1969; A. Marwick, The Nature ofHistory, London, Macmillan, 1970.

3 J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History, London, Longman, 1984.4 For example: R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford,

Blackwell, 1980; R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1989; T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Oxford,Blackwell, 1983; J. Frow, Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge(Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1986; D. Bromwich, A Choice ofInheritance, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1989.

5 P. Geyl, Debates with Historians, London, Fontana, 1962; M. Bloch,The Historian’s Craft, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1954;R. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1946; H. White, The Content of the Form, London, JohnsHopkins University Press, 1987; M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, NewYork, Pantheon, 1980.

6 A. Callinicos, Making History, New York, Cornell University Press,1988; M. Oakeshott, On History, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983; R. Chartier,Cultural History, Oxford, Polity, 1988; S. Horigan, Nature and Culture inWestern Discourses, London, Routledge, 1989; E. Wolfe, Europe and thePeople Without History, London, University of California Press, 1982;M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, London, Verso, 1983; I.Hassan, ‘The Culture of Post-Modernism’, Theory, Culture and Society,2, 3, 1985, 119–32.

7 G. Stedman-Jones, ‘The Poverty of Empiricism’, in R. Blackburn (ed.),Ideology in Social Science, London, Fontana, 1972; R. Samuel, ‘GrandNarratives’, History Workshop Journal, 29, 1990; D. Cannadine, ‘BritishHistory: Past, Present – and Future?’, Past and Present, 116, 1987; C.Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850, Edinburgh, Donald,1990.

8 This does not mean to say that one must be unaware of the danger ofhistory’s possible subordination to literary imperialism; thus Bennett:‘the conspectus on the past as an infinite text which can only be

notes86

endlessly retextualised rests on a transference to the past of litera-ture’s own object and procedures. It is a literalisation of the pastwhich must be judged as an attempt to extend the sway of literature’sown regime of truth into that of history’ (T. Bennett, Outside Literature,London, Routledge, 1990, p. 280). A self-aware raid on literature’sprocedures as and when required, then, is more to my point.

9 The chapters have been kept short for several reasons, the main onebeing the introductory and polemical nature of the text which meansthat I have not gone in for a general coverage to dip into (e.g. Mar-wick, op.cit.) but have tried to keep this introductory argument briefenough to be read in one or two sittings and thus kept in mind in onego. I also ought to say that I have not tried to make this text anythingother than basic and ‘teacherly’. I am aware of the way it has simpli-fied complex areas – for example the history of post-modernism – butmy aim has been to put the arguments briefly and then indicate infootnotes the more sophisticated and scholarly treatments one mightgo to. In other words, I have tried to push further reading towardsome of the texts I have used behind the scenes of this book, whilstdeliberately keeping most of them out of it.

1 WHAT HISTORY IS

1 J. Sturrock, Structuralism, London, Paladin, 1986, p. 56.2 See, for example, the journal History and Gender, Blackwell, which

started in 1989; V. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity, London,Routledge, 1989; E. Showalter, Speaking of Gender, London,Routledge, 1989.

3 On the relationship between history and fiction see: H. White, TheContent of the Form, London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; L.Hutcheon, A Poetics of Post-Modernism, London, Routledge, 1988; T.Bennett, Outside Literature, London, Routledge, 1990; V. Descombes,Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1980, especially chapter 4; H. White, Tropics of Discourse, London,Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, especially chapter 5, ‘The Fic-tions of Factual Representation’.

4 D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985, especially chapter 5.

5 S. Giles, ‘Against Interpretation’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 28,1, 1988. A similar point, made for very different reasons, is putby Michael Oakeshott in On History, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983. For

notes 87

Oakeshott a historically understood past is the conclusion of a criticalenquiry of a certain type, ‘to be found nowhere but in a history book. . . history is . . . an enquiry in which authenticated survivals from thepast are dissolved into their component features in order to be usedfor what they are worth as circumstantial evidence from which to infera past which has not survived; a past composed of passages of relatedhistorical events . . . and assembled as themselves answers to ques-tions about the past formulated by a historian’ (p.33).

6 Lowenthal, op.cit., p.216.7 G. Steiner, After Babel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p.234.8 Lowenthal, op.cit., p.218.9 ibid., p.218.

10 G. Elton, The Practice of History, London, Fontana, 1969, pp.70,112–13.

11 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, London, Merlin, 1979, p.193.12 A. Marwick, The Nature of History, London, Macmillan, 1970, pp.187,

190.13 D. Steel, ‘New History’, History Resource, 2, 3, 1989.14 J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, London, Macmillan, 1969, passim.15 P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country, London, Verso, 1985.16 A fuller treatment of these sorts of practices can be found in M.

Stanford, The Nature of Historical Knowledge, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986,especially chapter 4 onwards.

17 R. Scholes, Textual Power, London, Yale University Press, 1985; T.Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, London, New Left Books, 1976; S.Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1980; T. Bennett, op.cit.,

18 This definition is not unlike that arrived at for literature by John Frow,Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard UniversityPress, 1986. For Frow, literature ‘designates a set of practices forsignification which have been socially systematised as a unity andwhich in turn regulate the production, the reception, and the circula-tion of texts assigned to this category. It thus constitutes a commonform of textuality for formally and temporally disparate texts, althoughthis shared space may be riven by antagonistic regimes of significa-tion corresponding to different class (or race or gender or religious)positionings and their different institutional bases’ (p.84).

notes88

2 ON SOME QUESTIONS AND SOME ANSWERS

1 G. Steiner, Real Presences, London, Faber, 1989, p.71.2 ibid., p.1.3 Quoted in A. Sheridan, Foucault: The Will to Truth, London, Tavistock,

1980, p.46.4 Steiner, op.cit., pp.93–5.5 R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1989, p.3.6 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York, Pantheon, 1981, pp. 131–3.7 G. Steiner, After Babel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p.110,

passim.8 Of course I do not in this text deny the existence of the actuality of the

past but only that, logically, that past cannot entail one and only oneevaluation of it (re: the fact-value distinction, which of course, veryobviously, admits of ‘facts’). I do not, moreover, deny that the term‘truth’ has a literal meaning in certain discourses as a ‘truth effect’.But, as ‘truth’ is a term that is applied only to statements in analyticalcontexts (e.g. deductive logic) and not to the wider contexts them-selves of which statements are but one kind of linguistic construct,then historians, involved as they are in such wider arguments (inter-pretations) cannot refer to these wider arguments/interpretations astrue. In fact to speak of a ‘true interpretation’ is a contradiction interms. See Oakeshott on this (On History, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983,p.49, passim) and F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Reply to Professor Zagorin’, His-tory and Theory, 29, 1990, 275–96. See also the background to Ank-ersmit: F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Post-modernism’,History and Theory, 28, 1989, 137–53, and P. Zagorin, ‘Historiographyand Post-modernism: Reconsiderations’, History and Theory, 29,1990, 263–74. See also R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism,Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, and H. White, Trop-ics of Discourse, London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

9 R. Skidelsky, ‘A Question of Values’, The Times Educational Supple-ment, 27.5.1988. Skidelsky is one of those historians who seem tobelieve that different interpretations of the same set of events are theresult of ideological distortions or inadequate factual data, arguing, ineffect, that if one only eschewed ideology and remained true to thefacts then certain knowledge would appear. But, as White has argued,in the unprocessed record of the past and in the chronicle of eventswhich the historian extracts from the record, the facts exist only as a

notes 89

congeries of contiguously related fragments which then need to beput together through some enabling matrix. This would not be newsto many historians ‘were they not so fetishistically enamoured of thenotion of “facts” and so congenitally hostile to “theory” in any formthat the presence in a historical work of a formal theory used toexplicate the relationship between facts and concepts is enough toearn them the charge of having defected to the despised sociology orhaving lapsed into the nefarious philosophy of history’ (White, op.cit.,p.126).

10 Much of this argument is taken from K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘OnBias’, History Resource, 2, 3, 1989.

11 The gist of this section is taken from K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘OnEmpathy’, Teaching History, 54, April 1989.

12 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983;O. R. Jones, The Private Language Argument, London, Macmillan, 1971.

13 Steiner, After Babel, pp. 134–6.14 ibid., p.138.15 T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, London, New Left Books, 1976, p.3.16 Steiner, After Babel, p.18.17 R. Barthes, in D. Attridge et al. (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Ques-

tion of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.3. Aswe have seen in this section on evidence, Elton’s views would runcounter both to Barthes’ and my own; Elton talks of a ‘mass of histor-ical facts’ and of the almost unproblematic ‘cumulative building up ofassured knowledge of both fact and interpretation’, G. Elton, The Prac-tice of History, London, Fontana, 1969, pp.84–5. See also M. Stanfordon historical evidence and construction in The Nature of HistoricalKnowledge, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, especially chapter 5.

18 See White, op.cit., p.52.19 T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, p.201.20 See for introductory reading on history and science, P. Gardner, Theor-

ies of History, London, Collier-Macmillan, 1959.21 This section draws on White, op.cit., especially chapter 1, ‘The Burden

of History’.22 ibid., p.28.23 H. White, The Content of the Form, London, Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1987, p.227, note 12.24 White, Tropics of Discourse, pp.46–7.

notes90

3 DOING HISTORY IN THE POST-MODERN WORLD

1 A. Callinicos, Against Post-Modernism, Oxford, Polity, 1989.2 J. F. Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, Manchester, Manchester

University Press, 1984.3 Much of this explanatory story is used to discuss National Curriculum

School History in K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘Always Historicise . . .‘,Teaching History, 62, January 1991.

4 See G. Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, London, Faber, 1971, especiallychapter 1: ‘The Great Ennui’.

5 J. F. Lyotard, ‘Time Today’, The Oxford Literary Review, 11, 1–2, 1989,pp. 3–20, at p.12.

6 F. Jameson, ‘Post-modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-ism’, New Left Review, 146, 1984. See also P. Dews (ed.), Habermas:Autonomy and Solidarity, London, Verso, 1986.

7 Steiner, op.cit., p.66.8 See Callinicos, op.cit., especially chapter 5: ‘So What Else Is New?’,

pp.121–71.9 For a general view of post-modernism see D. Harvey, The Condition of

Post-Modernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989.10 Callinicos, op.cit., p.18.11 R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1989, especially the Introduction.12 P. Widdowson, ‘The Creation of a Past’, The Times Higher Education

Supplement, 3.11.90. See also P. Widdowson (ed.), Re-reading English,London, Methuen, 1982.

13 Widdowson, The Times Higher Education Supplement.14 See in particular T. Bennett, Outside Literature, London, Routledge,

1990, especially chapter 3 (Literature/History) and chapter 10 (Criti-cism and Pedagogy: The Role of the Literary Intellectual). Bennett’sarguments for a type of post-Marxism and beyond versus post-modernism is interesting and to the point vis-à-vis ‘the nature of his-tory’, wrestling, as he does, with the past as a discursive construct yetwanting it to somehow prevent any sort of discursive practiceappropriating it at will. See also, for an attempt to produce a form ofsolidarity that accepts contingency, irony and freedom and yet whichtries to discourage this from becoming ‘anything goes’, Rorty’s reallyquite brilliant (liberal) work, op.cit.

15 R. Young, Untying the Text, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981,p.viii.

notes 91

16 For a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion and critique offlabby notions of democracy, empowerment, alignment and emanci-pation, see Bennett, op.cit., chapters 9 and 10. See also the post-Marxist discursive approach of C. Mouffe and E. Laclau in Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy, London, Verso, 1985, which Bennett analyses inchapter 10, deepening the ‘solidarity’ problematics of democracy etc.only gestured towards in this book.

17 On this see White’s comments that, unlike the twentieth century’sprejudice for empirical history as the sole access to reality, the greatphilosophers of history (Vico, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce) and thegreat classic writers of historiography (Michelet, Carlyle, Ranke, Droy-son, Burckhardt) at least ‘had a rhetorical self-consciousness thatpermitted them to recognise that any set of facts was variously, andequally legitimately, describable, that there is no such thing as a singlecorrect description of anything, on the basis of which an interpret-ation of that thing can subsequently be brought to bear. They recog-nise, in short, that all original descriptions . . . are already interpret-ations’ (H. White, Tropics of Discourse, London, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1978, p.127).

18 P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, London, Penguin, 1973,passim.

notes92

INDEX

accounts of past 14Althusser, Louis 45, 74Ankersmit, Frank xiiassessment in education 20, 52autobiographies, collective 22–3axiomatic fictions 49

balance 42–4, 54–5; see also biasBarthes, Roland xvi; The Discourse

of History 60–1, 81; evidence90n17; reality effect xiv

Bennett, Tony 30; culturalcriticism 81; literalisation ofpast 86–7n8; post-Marxism91n14, 92n16

bias 44–5; empiricism 45, 46; facts45; objectivity 45; readings 46;sources 46; truth 47

Bloch, Marc 2, 3Borges, Jorge Luis 37bourgeoisie 22, 72–3

Callinicos, A. 3Cannadine, David 3capitalism: bourgeoisie 73;

Marxism 74; post-modernism80; production mode 73;relativism 74; social formations75

Carr, E. H.: evidence xvi, 58, 59;What is History? 1

cause and effect 19, 20, 61–3censorship 39centres: see decentringcertaintism 13, 34, 38change/continuity 19, 20, 61Chinese encyclopaedia example 37Christianity/truth 35, 38chronicles 40Collingwood, R. G. 2, 52–3common sense 36, 38, 72communication/translation 48communism 73–4

concepts x, xi; heartland 19–20, 23,61; ideology 20; knowledge19–20; methodology 19;philosophy of history xi; truth 36

constructions: empathy 53–4;history xiii, 9, 14–15, 21;masculinity 9; meaning 4, 11;truth 38; see also socialformations

consumption, history texts 29continuity 19, 20, 61controversies 15, 21–2, 23; see also

Carr, E. H.; Elton, GeoffreyCopernican model 36Croce, Benedetto 48Cromwell, Thomas 50–1cultural criticism 14, 81–2

dates 40decentring 71, 75, 78deconstructionist approaches 2;

difference 29, 30–1; influence onhistory xviii; truth 36

descriptions 11, 92n17difference: deconstructionist

approaches 29, 30–1; recognitionof 68; series of 75; similarity 20;see also otherness

disciplines xdiscourse: dominant 63–4;

Foucault xiii; history xvii, 1, 6–7,12, 22, 31–2, 39, 41, 85–6n1;literary criticism 64; meaning6–7; perspectives 16–17;readings 4, 10–11; referent 60–1

documents, fetishised 3, 58

Eagleton, Terry 30, 64; Criticism andIdeology 49–50

education: assessment 20, 52;

empathy 55; examinations 20;history 20–1, 51–2; historyteachers xv–xvi; personalisedpedagogy 52, 55; power 20–1;pressures 51–2

Elton, Geoffrey 2, 18; on Cromwell50–1; England under the Tudors9; evidence xvi, 58, 59, 60,90n17; facts 45; Marwick on17–18; The Practice of History 1,17; sources 59; truth 34

empathy 19, 47–8; balance 54–5;constructions 53–4; education55; empiricism 55–6; idealism55; ideology 53–4, 55; literarycriticism example 49–50;rationality 54–5; socialistinterpretation 56;understanding 51, 58;Wittgenstein 48

empiricism: bias 45, 46;empathy 55–6; facts xii; historyxii–xiii, 3; structuralism 18–19;truth 47

empowerment 79, 85–6n1epistemology xvi, xviii, 2, 12–16;

history as art/science 66; past/history 23; professionalhistorians 25–6

European inter-war years example41–2

evidence: Barthes 90n17; Carr xvi,58, 59; Carr–Elton dispute xvi, 58,59–60; as concept 19, 20; Eltonxvi, 58, 59, 60, 90n17; falsification45; professional historians 60;sources 59

exchange-value 74–5exploitation 73extremism 54

index94

facts: bias 45; concepts x; Elton 45;empiricism xii; history xiii, 90n17;interpretation 40–4, 55–6;meaning 40–1; methodology x;naïve realism 3; past 40, 89n8;suppression 64; and theory90n9; truth 89n8; values 13, 22,41, 89n8; White 66, 89–90n9,92n17

falsification 45femininst approach 2, 9, 46, 74,

79–80Fish, S. 30Foucault, Michel xvi, 2; discourse

xiii; histories of the present 83–4;The Order of Things 36–7;Power/Knowledge 38–9

Frankfurt School 74freedom, reciprocal 54French Revolution example 61–3Freudian approach 2Frow, John 88n18

genres of history xviii, 2, 30, 78–9,80

geography 10, 11Geyl, Pieter 2Giles, Steven 14God 35, 36, 72Gramsci, Antonio 45, 46, 74

Hampson, Norman 63hindsight 15–16historians 3, 8–9; accuracy of

accounts 14; axiomatic fictions49; controversies 15, 21–2, 23;interpretation 14–15, 17–18; asnarrators 14–15; objectivity 17;perspectives xi; presuppositions13, 25–6; sources 15; subjectivity

17; see also professionalhistorians

histories xi, 78, 80, 83, 84historiography x, xviii; description

92n17; English tradition 3; history7–8, 14, 42–4

history xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, 31–2, 82; ascollective autobiographies 22–3;as construction xiii, 9, 14–15, 21;as craft 63; discourse xvii, 1, 6–7,12, 22, 31–2, 39, 41, 85–6n1; ineducation 20–1, 51–2;empiricism xii–xiii, 3; facts xiii,90n17; genres xviii, 2, 30, 78–9,80; historiography 7–8, 14, 42–4;interpretation 11–12, 50–1;knowledge xiii–xiv, 17; landscapeexample 10–11, 21; and literature86–7n8; Marx 65; modernisation3–4; narrative xii; past xi–xiii,7–9, 12, 16, 23, 29, 58; post-modernism xvii, xx, 3, 70–1, 84;power xiii, 23–4; readings 9, 46;as science/art 65–6; truth 17,66–7, 79; women 9

history of minds 53–4history teachers xv–xvihistory texts 27–9history theory xviii, 2–3, 6–7, 30Hitler, Adolf 15Hobsbawm, Eric 63human nature 25–6, 55, 56

ideology xiii, 12, 20–4; concepts 20;empathy 53–4, 55; interpretation18, 29–30, 89–90n9; liberalism43, 53–4; power 21, 23, 29–30;professional historians 24–5,29–31; social formations 21

impartiality 28; see also bias

index 95

individualism 3intentions 51interpretation 43–4; descriptions

92n17; facts 40–4, 55–6;geography 11; historians 14–15,17–18; history 11–12, 50–1; historytheory 30; ideology 18, 29–30,89–90n9; language 39, 40–1;left/right/centre balance 42–4;past 15; presuppositions 49;readings 7, 29, 83; relativism 30;sociology 11; sources 48; speech48, 51; suppression of facts 64

intertextuality 2, 9, 78–9irony 77, 82

Jenkins, Keith xi, xii; academicbackground xv–xvi; Re-FiguringHistory xviii; Re-Thinking Historyxi, xiv, xvi–xvii

Khlebnikov, V. V. 15knowledge: absolute 35, 36;

categories 25–6; concepts19–20; history xiii–xiv, 17;objectivity xii, 67; past xii–xiii,55–6; Plato 35, 36; power 79,86n1; relativism 41; scepticism67–8, 69; sources 58; truth 36

labour market 74–5Laclau, E. 92n16landscape example 10–11, 21language xiv; as game 39, 67;

interpretation 39, 40–1; meaning2, 53; past 53

liberalism 43, 46–7, 53–4, 56, 77literary criticism example 49–50,

64, 83literature 2, 4, 86–7n8, 88n18

Lowenthal, David 14–15, 16; ThePast is a Foreign Country 13–14

Lyotard, Jean-François 71, 75; ThePost-Modern Condition 71

Maitland, F. W. 15marginalised people: difference 75;

history 9, 22; past/history 9;power 20, 79

market forces 74, 75Marwick, Arthur xvi; on Elton 17–18;

on Jenkins xvii; methodology 18,45; The Nature of History 1, 17

Marx, Karl 65, 73Marxism 45–6; capitalism 74;

causality 62; literature 2;Thompson 17, 57; universality 74

Marxist-Leninist interpretations 44masculinity 9materialism, historical 17meaning: construction 4, 11;

discourse 6–7; facts 40–1;language 2, 53

metanarratives 71–2, 75, 78methodology 2, 16–20; concepts

19; diversity 23; facts x; history asart/science 66; Marwick 18, 45;naïve realism 3; post-modernismxviii; professional historians 26,66; reflexivity 82, 84; truth 18–19

Mill, J. S. 54, 55modernity 75, 84moral judgement 20Mouffe, C. 92n16Munslow, Alun xi–xiv

narrative x, xii, 11, 14–15, 22; see alsometanarratives

Nietzsche, Friedrich x, xvi, 78nihilism 76

index96

Oakeshott, Michael 3, 88n5objectivity: bias 45; historians 17;

knowledge xii, 67; re-creation ofpast 45; truth 34–5

ontology 2Orwell, George 23; 1984 13, 22, 24other minds problem 48otherness 37, 55–6; see also

difference

Parker, Christopher 3past: accounts 14; facts 40, 89n8;

hindsight 15–16; historicisationxx; history xi–xiii, 7–9, 12, 16, 23,29, 58; intentions 51;interpretation 15; knowledgexii–xiii, 55–6; language 53;literalisation 86–7n8; narrative22; objective re-creation 45;otherness 55–6; post-modernism80; presuppositions 56–7;readings of 8–9; re-description77–8; truth 24, 67; see also tracesof past

pedagogy, personalised 52, 55perspectives xi, 16–17, 20–1philosophy 2, 4philosophy of history xi, xvii,

92n17Plato 35, 36, 38Plumb, J. H.: The Death of the Past

24post-Marxism 91n14, 92n16post-modernism: capitalism 80;

histories 84; history xvii, xx, 3,70–1, 84; irony 77; Lyotard 71;methodology xviii; past 80; post-Marxism 91n14; reappraisal 76;reflexivity 69; social formation 71

power: education 20–1; history xiii,

23–4; ideology 21, 23, 29–30;knowledge 79, 86n1;marginalised people 20, 79;perspectives 20–1; socialformations 31; truth 38–9

pragmatism 74, 75pre-modernity 72present, Foucault 83–4presuppositions 76; historians 13,

25–6; interpretation 49; past56–7

professional historians 78;academic pressures 52–3;epistemology 25–6; evidence 60;ideology 24–5, 29–31; asinterpreter 58; methodology 26,66; pressures 25–8, 52–3;presuppositions 13, 25–6;publication 27–8; re-productionof traces of past 27

proletariat 73, 75property ownership 72–3

rationality 35, 38, 54–5readings 13–14, 79; bias 46;

discourse 4, 10–11; Eagleton49–50; feminist approach 79–80;history 9, 46; history texts 29;interpretation 7, 29, 83;intertextuality 9; past 8–9

realism: naïve 3; social 20reality xii, xiv, 11reciprocity, rational 54re-description of past 77–8referees 28referent in discourse 60–1reflexivity 31, 68–9, 82, 84relativism: capitalism 74;

interpretation 30; knowledge 41;scepticism 56, 68, 75

index 97

re-production of traces of past27

retrospection 16re-writing of history 23Rieff, Philip 84Rorty, Richard xiii, 38, 91n14;

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity77

Same/Other 37Samuel, Raphael 3scepticism 2, 76; knowledge 67–8,

69; nihilism 76; reflexivity 68–9;relativism 56, 68, 75

Schama, Simon 63Scholes, R. 30School’s Council History 20science 35, 36, 38sequence 20similarity/difference 20Skidelsky, Robert 41, 42–3, 44,

89–90n9social class 72, 73social formations: ideology 21;

market capitalism 75; post-modernism 71; power 31;universities 25

social realism 20socialism 56, 74sociology 10, 11solar system 36sources 57–61; bias 46; Elton 59;

evidence 59; historians 15;interpretation 48; knowledge58; unpublished/published26–7

space concept 20speech 48, 51Stedman-Jones, Gareth 3Steel, Donald 19–20

Steiner, George 38, 40–1, 48–9,53, 75–6

structuralism 18–19subjectivity 17suppression of facts 64

Taylor, A. J. P. 15, 42teachers of history 51technical vocabulary 26text 27–9; accuracy 14; Eagleton

49–50; as sources 57–61;Steiner 40–1

things/words 36–7Thompson, E. P. 18; The Making

of the English Working Class 57;The Poverty of Theory 17

time 19, 20Tosh, John xvi; The Pursuit of

History 2traces of the past 27, 57–61translation 48Trevor-Roper, H. 15Trotsky, Leon 45, 46truth 34–9; bias 47; censorship 39;

Christianity 35, 38; commonsense 36, 38; concepts 36;constructions 38;deconstructionist approaches36; Elton 34; empiricism 47;facts 89n8; God 35, 36;history 17, 66–7, 79; knowledge36; methodology 18–19;objectivity 34–5; past 24, 67;Plato 38; power 38–9;rationality 35

uncertainty 35underclass 75understanding/empathy 51, 58universality: dominant mode 47;

index98

historical concepts 19, 20;liberalism 56; Marxism 74;Skidelsky 44

universities 20, 25USSR 44, 73–4

values/facts 13, 22, 41, 89n8

World War II 15Watt, D. C. 42Western tradition 35, 76White, Hayden xvi, xvii, 2;

empiricism xii; facts 66,

89–90n9, 92n17;relativism/scepticism 68;Tropics of Discourse x–xi

Whitehead, A. N. 35Widdowson, Peter 79, 80Wittgenstein, Ludwig 48women in history 9words 36–8; see also languageworking class 22, 73, 75Wright, Patrick: On Living in an Old

Country 24

Young, Robert 83

index 99